How We’re Tracking

When the pandemic began, we declared four prioritized goals at TSS for how we would navigate and make decisions. Our first commitment was protecting the health and safety of our students, staff, and community. After health and safety, in cascading order we prioritized the financial integrity of the TSS, stewarding faculty and staff, and realizing learning opportunities through various means as conditions allowed. With summer “starting” and clarifying picture of fall, I want to share the information and plan we know now.

Summer. Programming is at a significantly reduced volume we can feel confident protecting the health and safety of our students, faculty/staff, and the community.

• Beginning next week through the end of August we will be running two camps per week of 12 students each on the Jackson Campus. As of earlier this week, all summer camps are full with waitlists. We have a record number of 60–70 campers joining from our relationship with One22.
• We continue to support eight virtual Americorps members at their homes around the country engaged in service for non-profits on the west and east sides of the Tetons.
• Beginning next week we will resume wildlife tour day programming for intact groups at a capacity of up to three vehicles per day.

Fall.

• We intend to open Mountain Academy in person. Many individuals have been deeply involved in planning what in-person PreK-12 day learning looks like in the fall to give us resilience in shifting between in-person learning, distance learning, and modified versions between.
• We intend to open our Graduate program in person in the fall. Three key assets to running this program are the small volume of students (11–14), all students are adults, and no other programming is happening on the Kelly Campus.
• Place Network and the Teacher Learning Center plan to continue to support our network schools and teachers virtually through the fall.
• We are moving forward with our planned August WEMT and October WFR and WFR recent. Based on significant demand, we worked with NOLS Wilderness Medicine to add WEMT’s in September and November. All of this wilderness medicine programming will now be run on the Jackson Campus. As we host but don’t run the programming, these fit into our plan to consider facility rentals particularly for adults on longer programming.
• We anticipate running another fall Americorps virtual cohort under the same model as this summer.

The summer Board meeting is on July 15th. Prior to that date, all staff will receive the Board Report. In it you will find more detail on current program and operational planning, our financial plan for the fiscal year, and other happenings across TSS. Summer and fall 2020 look significantly different than just 12 months ago. At the same time, we are feeling optimistic about the above plan providing high-quality learning for our students in a way that protects health and safety and creates viable income protecting the financial integrity of TSS.