I have decided that I am going to try and focus more on Valley State University and less on the city of Valley City. To me it seems that doing this paper on VCSU will be much easier as there are not as many people that were giving out information to the faculty, staff, and students. I feel that the faculty and staff ant VCSU were very good at getting out the information that everybody needed to know during the flood fighting effort and what was going to happen afterwards. Also I feel that the teachers were very accommodating to the students with how assignments were going to be done and how they would be turned in. Also the teachers were very accommodating with the students that I have talked to that do not have easy access to the internet to complete the assignments that were given out.
I feel that Dr. Shirley did an excellent job of making sure that everyone knew what was going on and making time available to the students so that they could go and help sandbag and with other parts of the flood fighting effort. The faculty and staff were very reasonable about canceling class during this crisis and that made it a lot easier to help with the effort that was put forth to fight this flood. By allowing the students to help out it also had a very positive reflection on VCSU and the students that go to school there. I heard lots of people talking about how much they appreciated the effort that was put forth from the VCSU students during this flood. I am sure that many of the people that were involved in this flood will remember the effort that was made by everyone to fight this flood and keeping it from doing much damage to Valley City.
One thing that will help with writing this paper is that I still have all of the emails that were sent out to the students about what would be happening with classes and the flood fighting. These emails were a very good source of communication between the staff and the students. Also the text messages that were sent out to the students that were on that program would have been helpful in knowing what was going on during this flood. To me it seems that everyone at VCSU did an excellent job of notifying people of what was going on.
That will be a very good source of information to have on all the e-mails that were sent out from Dr. Shirley and staff at VCSU. This situation did affect everyone that lived in it from the end of spring break, all the way to the very end of the school year... I just hope that we don't see another flood like this for another 20-30 years or it will be too soon.
ReplyDeleteJosh, you just made me want to switch my paper to focusing on VCSU. That sounds way easier than doing it on the whole town. Yeah VCSU definitely played a big role in flood crisis communication along with helping fight the flood. It takes a whole community and with out VCSU students it would be tough to have fought the flood since it brings in 1000 kids each year. Good thing this didn't happen in the middle of the summer with down pours then we'd be screwed with a 1000 less men and women manning the front lines.
ReplyDeleteI do like how VCSU communicated throughout the university. I would say that the staff was very understanding about the flood efforts. None of my teachers had any problem with letting us out as long as we sandbagged.
ReplyDeleteI know that school and continuing education is important but at the same time, saving the community is as important, if not more.
I agree with you and Ben Simonson, you made it sound a lot easier than doing the communication on all of Valley City. I wish you would have wrote this sooner so i could have switched to. You are right without school at VCSU going on during the flood crisis, many more guards men and women would have been needed, along with lots more volunteers. We will never know what the outcome would have been without the help of VCSU.
ReplyDeleteI think you are right about it should be easier to do the project on VCSU than Valley City. Email was the main conveyance of information from VCSU and the spokesperson who sent most of those emails was Steven Shirley. I still have all the emails too, but I am just having a little difficulty trying to put together all the information into the research project. I hope you are having an easier time than I am.
ReplyDeleteDr. Shirley was a great spokesperson for VCSU. He did a great job. Email I would say was the greatest way of communication for the school but there were some days that I'm sure students not living on campus didn't have email all the time. I went to Valley City one day that school was cancelled because I don't have internet at home. That would be a great thing to add in you paper!
ReplyDeleteIt was so awesome to see VCSU join together to help out the city including its campus. I think that using not only email but also text messaging allowed more people to know what was going on, especially those that left and went back home. It was a good thing that the school decided to shut down during the flood and also a good thing that the teachers were so accommodating to students who didn't have easy ways of accessing the internet while away.
ReplyDeleteThe emails are a great resource for looking at some of the communications that were sent to students over the course of this crisis. Dr. Shirley is definitely one of the spokespersons for the crisis at VCSU. As well, I found another spokesperson to be David Klein, the Safety officer at VCSU. He published has a twitter account, and had his name of all the messages sent over Notifind. Really Dr. Shirley and David Klein both spokespersons.
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