College of the Atlantic's oceanfront campus is sandwiched between Maine's Frenchman Bay a...College of the Atlantic's oceanfront campus is sandwiched between Maine's Frenchman Bay and Acadia National Park.The COA campus has been closed since the Winter trimester ended in mid-March, with almost all staff, faculty, and students working from home. College officials will use the coming months to prepare campus for Fall term, President Darron Collins ’92 said.

“Our goal is to reopen our doors and have an on-campus term with a cohort of new and returning students,” Collins said. “But we recognize there are many forces beyond our control, so we are also developing contingency plans and are prepared to adapt as needed.”

Driving those contingency plans is the likelihood that a number of students and some staff and faculty may not be able to be on campus in the fall, either for reasons related to health and safety, travel, or otherwise. With that in mind, Collins said that it’s essential to develop a hybrid academic model that can work both on campus and online.

“We are building a fall term that will serve our students wherever they are,” Collins said. “That COA will hold an on-campus experience in the fall is not a mandate to students be on campus in the fall.”

The COA COVID-19 Emergency Response Team is tracking local, statewide, and national information on the pandemic, working with regional emergency preparedness and response groups, and consulting with local scientific partners at the Jackson Laboratory, MDI Biolab, and Mount Desert Island Hospital, Collins said. The COA Response Team is also working with the Maine Independent Colleges Association and other colleges and universities from across the country to understand how other schools are preparing for the fall.

“Our faculty and staff have been incredibly creative, flexible, and adaptable with our quick move to an online format this spring, and I know that everyone will pull together as a team in order to move forward this fall with an excellent program.”

“We will do everything we can to bring our students back to campus,” Collins said, “and it’s essential that we do so in a manner that is safe for our students, faculty, staff, and the larger Mount Desert Island community.”

That could involve changes to campus life, including implementing social distancing and masking guidelines, arranging for certain staff and faculty in vulnerable demographics to work from home, eliminating large gatherings, and incorporating COVID-19 testing for members of the COA community, Collins said.

“Our faculty and staff have been incredibly creative, flexible, and adaptable with our quick move to an online format this spring, and I know that everyone will pull together as a team in order to move forward this fall with an excellent program,” Collins said.

The COA Spring term is being held in an entirely online format, with just a dozen mostly international students staying on campus, around 90 students living in Bar Harbor, and the rest at home with their families and others in locations around the world. The school has cancelled all in-person summer events.

College of the Atlantic is a leader in experiential learning and environmental stewardship, and is the Princeton Review’s #1 Green College 2016-2019. Every COA student designs their own major in human ecology — which integrates knowledge from across academic disciplines and seeks to understand and improve the relationships between humans and their natural, built, and social environments — and sets their own path toward a degree. The intentionally small school of 350 students and 35 faculty members was founded in 1969 and offers Bachelor of Arts and Master of Philosophy degrees.