Zach Powers '10

HOSPITAL HEROES
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Two former Lutes served on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York, one of the hardest-hit states in the nation.

Dr. Sean Boaglio ’13 triaged patients in two parking lot tents at Stony Brook University Hospital, where he’s the academic chief resident in the Emergency Medicine Department. His wife, Chrissy Boaglio ’14, is a physician assistant who works at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan in the OB/GYN department, where every woman giving birth is tested. She also administered tests in a parking lot — about 70 people a day — and volunteered to help at a Long Island community hospital on the COVID-19 Emergency Response Team.

Both worked almost around the clock. Chrissy stayed at a hotel her hospital provided, because there was no way to do it all with a long commute. The couple didn’t see each other a lot, but when they did, they worked out (even if it was just in their living room) and turned off technology to relieve stress.

“You can’t prepare really for a disease like this. It’s exciting and an honor to be a clinician at this time, but at the same time terrifying,” Chrissy said. “You can do all the studying you want, but it still wouldn’t prepare you for what we’ve been seeing here in New York.”

HEALTH LEADERSHIP THROUGH THE UNKNOWN
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PLU Regent Charleen Tachibana ’77 is the senior vice president and chief nursing officer at Virginia Mason Health System, where she oversees quality and safety for patient care, including the practice of nursing. During the outbreak of COVID 19, she served as co-commander of Virginia Mason’s incident command center.

“I don’t think we’ve had anything of this magnitude and of this type of intensity. We’ve had other types of unknown factors that have come in during my career. Like when the AIDS epidemic came in, it was unknown. It was slower and maybe didn’t cause the same level of hysteria in such a concentrated period of time,” she said. “We have significant challenges around shortages of PPE (personal protective equipment) and the lack of testing abilities. Just a lot of unknowns that vary from day to day, that then need to be addressed.

SPECIAL EDUCATION TEACHER LEARNS REMOTE LEARNING
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Erin Azama ’01 teaches special education at Grant Center for Expressive Arts, an elementary school in Tacoma’s North End. When schools turned to remote learning due to COVID-19, she had to figure out how to stay connected with her students.

For some families, remote learning was especially difficult — access to technology and supplies were hard. Some already were overwhelmed trying to access food and rent, she said.

Like other teachers, her goal was to help make sure the kids were safe and learning. She would tell parents having trouble teaching math from the book that day to take the lesson into the kitchen while making banana bread.

She’s used to getting creative and thinking on the fly because there is no such thing as a routine day when you are in education — even minus a pandemic.

LEADING THE RESCUE MISSION DURING A PANDEMIC
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Duke Paulson ’93, MAE ’01, is the executive director of Tacoma’s Rescue Mission, which serves the city’s homeless population. He and his staff rely on 7,000 volunteers a year to help with everything from distributing meals, to cleaning, tutoring and more.

But when COVID-19 struck, the volunteer pool shriveled, with volunteer numbers down 30 percent. Workers and the volunteers that stuck around had a lot of anxiety. Paulson knew things had to adapt quickly.

So the mission began practicing social distancing and expanded shelter space. The dining hall turned into a dormitory. All meals were to-go. The same volume of people were served, just differently.

Paulson worked on getting more volunteers – calling everyone he knew and posting on social media. An old PLU friend connected him to the president at Bellarmine Preparatory School in Tacoma and they agreed to partner. Nearly 60 men were sleeping in the school gym every night.

Paulson credits his strong team, the people he has around him, and community support for leadership success.

TELLING COVID-19 NEWS STORIES
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After she shifted to working remotely, Kari Plog ’11 constructed blanket forts to create a makeshift recording studio in her home.

The digital content manager at KNKX, a local NPR affiliate radio station, Plog produced radio segments and podcasts for her station from inside the sound-muffling barrier.

Even though she and her team were largely working from home and practicing social distancing, they also had to venture into the field. Plog said the COVID-19 story has been a challenging one to cover, because it changes so quickly. It can also be heart-wrenching, like when she interviewed the daughter of a retired nurse who died of COVID-19.

However, doing her part and sharing news that is important to the community is rewarding.

“Being in the thick of it is stressful,” she said. “But it also provides an incredible sense of purpose.”

“Some of the organizational schema was really helpful, but in some ways it wasn’t specialized enough for response to this particular emergency,” says Royce-Davis. “For example, our emergency protocol does not have a cleaning committee, but a cleaning committee was absolutely necessary for response to this.”

A cleaning committee was just the start of what quickly became an all-hands-on-deck effort. Incident command began meeting daily, often twice daily, and added staff members to represent additional offices and departments.

Command leadership quickly established that decisions would be informed by the best information available from a standard set of references anchored by the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and local agencies like the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department.

For about a month, incident command monitored the situation across the state, kept in daily contact with the county health department, and oversaw preventative measures like frequent high-touch surface cleaning and installing hand sanitizer stations throughout campus.

“Especially because Washington was the initial national epicenter, early on we were spending a lot of time analyzing the evolving research and information to determine how it might affect us on campus in the days ahead,” remembers Hopper. “In those early weeks it was a bit of a waiting game, but we pretty quickly got to the point of needing to lock down parts of campus, and much of our work became figuring out the best approaches to doing that.”

“It was important that we were calm, together and thinking critically and clearly about what we could really know and being clear about the decision-making process, and how decisions would impact students, faculty and staff,” remembers PLU President Allan Belton.

“There were probably 90 straight days last spring where a group of us were digging deep into the information and working toward making tough decisions.”

PIVOTING TO DISTANCE LEARNING

By early March, it became evident that in-person learning simply could not be done safely. “We just weren’t going to take any chances with people’s health and safety,” says Belton. “By that point, though it was a disappointing decision, it was not a difficult decision. It was just what needed to be done.”

The announcement that all regular classes would transition to distance learning was shared with the campus community via email on March 7. Students and faculty turned on a dime from in-person to largely online-based learning. Again, the questions poured in, this time from students to their professors. How will I complete my biology lab experiment? Will we still be presenting our capstone projects? Should I continue in my student-teaching role at a local elementary school?

Faculty members poured themselves into the work of supporting students and supporting each other. Led by the more than 75 professors who had been trained through the university’s PLUTO (PLU Teaching Online) institute, faculty members who were steeped in online teaching provided counsel to their peers.

“I appreciate how my colleagues have all come together to support each other during these times,” said Professor of Hispanic Studies Bridget Yaden in late March. “We’ve had department meetings via Zoom where we’ve been open and honest about the challenges, where we’ve shared teaching ideas, and where we’ve just been there to listen to each other.”

“Even for those of us comfortable with technology, the transition to a distance learning approach has been challenging, especially given the quick timeline for the change,” Yaden continued. “I encourage my colleagues to think of what works best for your teaching style and your students’ learning, and see how that can be adapted to distance learning.”

“In these most unprecedented and uncertain of times, our faculty are stepping up,” Provost Joanna Gregson shared via Facebook video on April 21. “They’re advocating for students, they’re extending deadlines, they’re moving assignments around to acknowledge the space students are in, and above all, they are teaching well. They are stepping up, because above all they value excellence in teaching.”

CARING FOR STUDENTS

In short order, upcoming concerts, athletic competitions, guest lectures and on-campus gatherings were cancelled.

The vast majority of PLU’s residential students opted to move off campus to complete the semester. Around 250 remained who felt that PLU was the safest place for them to complete the semester. Residence halls, dining services, the campus health center, and other essential student services remained open to meet the needs of the residential community.

“Our priority was ensuring that we would do our best by those students and to keep them safe and well,” says Royce-Davis. “We spent a lot of time thinking through how to safely provide meals and how to continue to safely provide some elements of community in the residence halls, even as that became more restrictive. We were also concerned about access to library resources and technology, and mental health resources.”

JEN RUDE AND MATT NELSON

By the end of March, the Student Care Network, a coalition of staff and students led by University Pastor Jen Rude and former Assistant Dean of Students Matt Nelson, launched a number of online initiatives to help keep students on and off campus connected. Among the efforts was “CheckFive,” a campaign that encouraged Lutes to reach out to five people and check in, specifically those who had seemed to go quiet during the pivot to distance learning

“CheckFive is about connecting and starting a conversation with a peer you miss seeing around campus,” said Lace Smith, associate vice president for Marketing and Communications. “Human interaction has never been more important — and someone out there might really need that phone call, text, email or social media message.”

For many, a major disappointment of the COVID spring was the inability to celebrate high school and college graduating classes at traditional spring commencement ceremonies. At PLU, students voted overwhelmingly in favor of postponing the in-person commencement ceremony to a later date over holding a virtual ceremony on the originally planned spring date.

To celebrate and support PLU’s Class of 2020, staff again had to innovate. Marketing and Communications created a suite of social digital tools, videos and resources graduates and their families could use to celebrate on social media. Alumni and Student Connections hosted an extensive series of online events to support graduates beginning their job searches. And on the day that commencement would have been held, 160 staff and faculty members called more than 800 undergraduate and graduate students with messages of congratulations and encouragement.

PLANNING FOR FALL SEMESTER

As soon as spring semester ended, staff and faculty began preparing for the fall. The incident command team that led the university through the spring gave way to an executive-staffed recovery planning team and working groups dedicated to academic affairs, student life, and administrative services.

“Our plan, based on modeling and indications from public-health agencies, is that we will return to in-person learning for the fall term with the appropriate and necessary health and safety measures in place,” Belton wrote to the campus community in late April.

“With each new day PLU staff and faculty members spend planning for fall semester, the different likely scenarios become slightly more clear to us,” Belton wrote in a June editorial in The News Tribune. “It’s no exaggeration to say that a reopening of campus will be the result of one of the most comprehensive plans ever created and executed in our institution’s 130-year history. Through it all, we will be guided by an unwavering commitment to well-being and safety.

“No matter the challenge — whether learning from a distance, learning while wearing face coverings, or living, learning, and working as alumni in our community — we remain true to an important aspect of our mission: to thoughtfully care for other people, our community and the Earth.”

Note to readers: the contents of this feature were finalized in July. It is possible that plans for Fall Semester have changed since this issue was sent to design and press.

Professor of Psychology Wendelyn Shore is passionate about mentorship — not just mentoring and being mentored but also the scholarly pursuit of deconstructing and analyzing the ethics of mentorships.

“There’s always a power differential in a mentoring relationship,” she says. “It’s always the mentor’s responsibility to be sensitive to that and to handle that in an ethical way.”

Shore’s interest in mentorship began with her involvement in developing PLU’s Wild Hope Project and continued when she and PLU psychology colleagues co-wrote multiple papers on the ethics of mentoring undergraduate students. In addition to teaching and scholarly pursuits (her primary research focus is on issues of language and knowledge), she recently co-founded Professional Mentoring Associates with PLU Dean of Students Eva Frey. Through this new venture, she will work with mentees to engage in meaningful self-reflection that allows them to set appropriate goals and then determine and implement strategies for achieving those goals. I recently sat down with her at 208 Garfield.

Have you found that most folks share a similar understanding of what “mentorship” means?

I think that’s right. At some level, everyone knows what mentoring is and what the traditional relationship should look like. A traditional older mentor, younger protege. A very intimate one-on-one relationship. The mentor takes the protege under their wing for learning a particular skill or ability or to provide general guidance and wisdom.

Now, I think very few of us in our everyday lives — personal life or professional — actually have achieved that type of mentoring relationship with someone. I think we have lots of approximations to that. Plus, to be honest, I’m not even sure that we should aim for it because there are lots of ethical questions that arise around that ideal.

That’s interesting. Like what?

Well, questions about dependency and appropriate boundaries, or power differential. It’s great to have a mentor, a teacher, a wise other who’s looking out for you, but if that person then starts interfering with aspects of your life or trying to direct aspects of your life, questions should arise about ethics. My work on mentoring started with issues that a mentor has a responsibility to attend to, in terms of the ethics of the ongoing relationship with the mentee. That’s why mentors need training.

Can that training be as a mentee of a great mentor?

It can be. But I also think there’s explicit information that should be conveyed, especially around, again, issues of ethics. I think you explicitly need to say to the 55-year-old white male, “You’re about to start mentoring a 23-year-old black woman. You can’t pretend that the difference in race doesn’t matter, you can’t pretend that the difference in sex doesn’t matter, and you can’t pretend that the difference in age doesn’t matter. To truly mentor this person, you need to be honest about those differences.”

I think that mentors need to hear that explicitly. I think most mentors aren’t necessarily aware that those kinds of demographic differences often create issues for the mentoring relationship around power differential and around boundaries.

Is it hard for institution-wide mentorship programs to work well?

I think what a lot of businesses do are very good professional advising programs. I would not call them mentoring in the traditional sense, but I’ll bet some of those relationships do develop into mentoring relationships. There’s a caring, thoughtfulness, and deep listening required by the mentor that happens in a true mentorship. A senior employee can meet with a junior employee for coffee and give professional advice about how to get promoted, but that’s not true mentoring. Because a mentor needs to learn what motivates you, what your goals are, what kind of work ethic you have, etc. The senior employee can still give great advice without learning those things about the junior employee, but that isn’t mentoring.

Is there an ideal lifespan to a mentorship?

I think the product of a mentoring interaction can be as short-lived as a single conversation that turns out to be incredibly meaningful and valuable, if not immediately, then down the road. I also think it can be the opposite extreme. It can be a lifelong relationship. My own mentoring relationships as both mentee and mentor certainly run the gamut of that. I’ve had really intense one-on-one conversations with students that afterward we both would have said, “Okay, that was a mentoring conversation.” Then I’ll never have a conversation like that with that student again. But I also have mentees who graduated some 15, 20, 30 years ago and I’m still in touch with them.

What sort of mental space are you in when you’re sitting down with a mentee and do you have particular rules for that time together?

From the mentor’s perspective, what I find myself reminding myself of, or mentally preparing, is this: For however long we’re going to talk — whether it’s a half-hour coffee, a two-hour lunch, or we’re together all afternoon — my mentee has my undivided attention. I make a conscious effort to make it clear to them “I am fully here for you and it’s not about what I have to say.”

That’s the other thing as the mentor, I’m going to absorb and listen. My mentee may not want advice about anything. I don’t know going into that particular meeting. It might just be about, “Hey, I need to talk to you because I just need to process this” and they just need to vent for an hour and a half.

In closing, what encouragement would you share with ResoLute readers who are interested in engaging more intentionally with a potential mentor or mentee in their life?

Mentoring relationships, whether in the role of mentor or mentee, can be some of the most rewarding and fulfilling relationships we have. They can be relationships that give our lives meaning. They represent substantial effort and investment, especially when conducted ethically and thoughtfully. In my experience, they’re worth every bit. Go for it!