So we had faculty who needed to learn how to teach their courses in a new way, and students who needed to learn how to go to college in a new way. We had administrators, including me, and staff members who all had to learn how to work entirely from home. And we had to learn it while doing it.

The faculty spent the week before we launched doing virtual training with our instructional design team and getting support from our I.T. group. Our student services team started doing video meetings with students for services like admissions coaching, advising and tutoring, and our finance team figured out how to move a 50-year-old paper payment system online in a week.

We had wanted to adapt our work in this way for a long time, but the urgency imperative to do it hadn’t been there, and other priorities took its place. The foundation board, our executive director and his team went into overdrive to find the money to pay for the new student devices, the wireless access, and emergency student support. Our union leadership reached out right away and asked how they could help.

Community colleges educate nearly half of all American college students. We spend our lives jury-rigging solutions with limited resources. We know what’s at stake in this crisis: our students’ ability to stay in college so they can graduate and get good jobs. The economic crash in our state now means unemployment numbers exceeding those of the great recession.

Our students work in restaurants, malls, casinos and other industries that have been hit hard by what is going on, and they have been laid off in significant numbers. We hear from them around the clock through our texting tool.

“This is extremely hard. My entire family got laid off this week,” wrote one. Another said, “I’m trying to take care of my two kids, ages five and seven, and figure out online schooling for all of us.”

Or: “We’re making the best of it. I’m juggling one computer with two younger siblings who are both trying to do high school online.”