California wildfires can not burn the spirit at MiraCosta College
Augusoft e-news - Volume 3, Issue 4

From: Lee, Lynda
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:58 PM
To: Augusoft, Inc.
Subject: Thanks for your concern

I can't begin to describe the events of the week, but thankfully things are beginning to improve. The fires are at least partially contained. I live in a relatively unscathed area, just lots of smoke, ashes and soot. That's true for all three of our campuses. The one hardest hit with debris is our San Elijo campus which is the farthest south and was in the direct line of the Witch Creek fire had it continued to move west. All schools and colleges in the county are closed; of course We also cancelled all classes at our off-campus locations. Certainly our fee-based programs will take a financial hit. We are hoping to be back in operation on Monday. An evacuation shelter is operating in our gym on the Barnard Drive campus complete with an animal shelter set up by the North County Humane Society. I went over this morning to drop off some donated items and was very impressed by the organization but most of all by the generosity of our community. There were mountains of donated clothing, blankets, food (both human and animal), toiletries, etc. The evacuees will leave there with items to help sustain them. From all reports that seems to be the case at all of the shelters.

Most of the information we currently have is about faculty and staff. Our computer folks set up a portal for people to report their status and that of others they've had contact with, availability of room for evacuees, special needs in the community, and so on. That has been very helpful. Many have been evacuated and are eager to get back into their neighborhoods to see what houses are standing and to assess the collateral damage. Individual faculty certainly have information about students, but we won't begin to know how many have been affected and in what ways until we are back in session. It's certain that we will be in recovery mode for a long time to come. I did find out this morning that we will be able to get into our Community Learning Center tomorrow. We hope to get some Halloween decorations up so our students will come back to something fun. This year's theme is Halloween-like and harvest celebrations around the world. One of the favorite activities during our reading festival was the open mic times, during which students, staff, and faculty read aloud so we plan to have a faux bonfire in our Community Room around which we will read ghost stories from around the world.

Continuing With The Positive

Here is the URL to our Community Education newsletter so you can see some of the great things our students, staff, and faculty have been doing.

http://www.miracosta.edu/Instruction/CommunityEducation/index.htm

Again, thank you for your concern.