As nearly a lifelong resident of Crawfordsville, Susan Albrecht loves the town and its people. That’s why we, as Wabash College students, sought her opinion about how the pandemic has impacted her, how the community can re-build, and how we can help.
Albrecht has served the Wabash College community at the Lilly Library for the last 25 years, where she is responsible for video acquisition for the library and is the college’s Fellowship Advisor, assisting students who want to apply for nationally competitive awards such as the Fulbright, Truman and Rhodes fellowships. She currently also is the vice president of the Crawfordsville Community School Corporation, as well as being an active member of St. John’s Episcopal Church and Tri Kappa sorority.
Although Albrecht was fortunate to keep her job during the pandemic — unlike many of our citizens — she said, “It [the virus] changed my job pretty markedly and quickly.” As the pandemic uprooted our lives, her role “adjusted very quickly as faculty members suddenly needed to be able to work with students no longer on campus and as the need for video work competed with time for advising students. … It was really difficult to figure out what to do with all the uncertainty.”
Along with her job responsibilities, the pandemic also influenced the ways in which Albrecht interacted with her family here in Crawfordsville. Albrecht’s son is a Wabash senior. The pandemic dominoed into aspects of home life we once would have called trivial — the “whole issue of how do we handle when you come home, want to do laundry or have a meal.” Suddenly the Albrecht family was faced with a hard choice: how to see their son while not endangering Albrecht’s 86-year-old mother. And then there were other practical questions: “Who is going to do the shopping for her? Who’s going to take care of household needs?” Fortunately, the Albrechts were able to have a socially distanced “Thanksgiving To-Go,” in which “we shared preparation of the meal, people came in with their masks and took food.”
Meanwhile, Albrecht — along with many, many others in the school system — helped carry the weight of how best to support Crawfordsville’s K-12 students. She requested a school board subcommittee be set up to consider pandemic impacts and strategies, supplementing the standard monthly board meetings. With the approval of Superintendent Scott Bowling and the Assistant Superintendent Rex Ryker, Albrecht and fellow CCSC board member Kathy Brown met weekly for updates, discussion and planning. These meetings considered topics from busing to athletics to safely handling meal times to adjusting classroom spaces, carefully considering for each: “What needs to change? What’s going well?”
Part of what went well for our schools were vaccine clinics. Thanks to the Crawfordsville Fire Department and the Montgomery County Public Health department, a host of teachers and school employees received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine as early as March 16. The students were next, with Crawfordsville High School recommending students age 16 or older to receive the vaccine during in-school vaccine clinics offered free of charge on April 16 and May 7.
When asked about the vaccine. Albrecht was all in — not only for her safety but for the safety and health of the entire community. She has volunteered at the local vaccination clinic weekly. Albrecht credits her daughter, who is in graduate school studying virology and a big proponent of vaccination, as reinforcing her confidence in the COVID-19 vaccines. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines offered here in town have undergone rigorous safety evaluations and are more than 94% effective at preventing COVID-19 illness by two weeks after the second dose — a miraculous gift.
Albrecht, who is now fully vaccinated, said, “Personally, I’m looking forward to the travel that we have missed,” and “At work, it will be nice to see faces when working with students,” moving away from the ever-present Zoom screen backgrounds of locations we could only imagine being in reality. As the community becomes immunized, she looks forward to being able to “get out and about and do things on my own,” to see her mom not be housebound, and “to see students in groups again.”
In some ways, life for Albrecht has already started to return to normal after getting her second shot. She’s been able to reconnect with friends she hasn’t seen in a long time. Not only were they getting together but they were together and unafraid of potentially exposing each other because of being fully vaccinated. To Albrecht and to many of us, the vaccine is the light at the end of the tunnel. After a year full of sacrifices and hardships, if we are able to all get vaccinated, we can finally be hopeful and put this behind us.
To sign up for your vaccine, visit https://vaccine.coronavirus.in.gov/en-US/. In the meantime, thank you for continuing to do the effective work of wearing masks and practicing social distancing in public spaces.
Written by Chukwunalu Chukwuma, Justin Dusza, Patrick Piesyk and Jordan Scott.
