This petition is in support of resuming classes virtually via Zoom for Nashville School of Law students. We successfully completed an entire year of classes last year on Zoom and would like to ask the school to resume virtual classes for this year's courses.

Unfortunately, Covid is still very much an issue and unfortunately, the school has not decided to resume classes virtually, despite the state of Tennessee topping the list of covid infections for numerous days now. While the school has enforced a mask policy, there is absolutely zero social distancing. Numerous students have been exposed since classes began and unfortunately, sometimes the only way we are aware of these students' exposure is from the students themselves, as the school does not seem to be releasing statistics of any sort on the number of students that are vaccinated or unvaccinated, the number of students exposed, the number of students who are quarantining, etc. etc. The school's covid policies rely on students to be honest about their exposure and also asks students to quarantine, forcing them to miss classes. The combined covid policies and attendance policies virtually force students to lie about exposure, in order to continue attending classes, or risk being forced to withdraw from the school after the 4 excused absences allotted per calendar year are exhausted. Many school districts in TN have been forced to close due to covid resurgences, yet Nashville School of Law has made no effort to update their policies to reflect the local environment. While we realize that some courses, such as trial courses, are difficult to do on zoom, the vast majority of classes are easy to conduct on zoom and were successfully conducted via zoom for the entire school year, last year. The school has already tried the zoom method and the results all seem to be pretty positive, with many students preferring virtual instruction to in person classes.

When the school was contacted at the beginning of the semester about their plans to do classes virtually, the students were told that there were no plans at the time to resume virtual learning. The responses were peppered with niceties and hope, but unfortunately these responses veer far from the reality of the world we are currently living in. We now know that vaccinated students can still become infected with covid as well as transmit covid. While vaccination lowers the risk of infection and severity of symptoms, it does not prevent the vaccinated from infecting non-vaccinated people, especially children. It seems that the school has a really simple solution that could assuage students' concerns and anxiety in light of the continuous covid outbreaks, yet the school chooses not to use it. We would like to ask Nashville School of Law to reevaluate their Covid policies and reinstitute virtual learning for any classes that can easily be conducted virtually. 

If you are a student, family member of a student, roommate of a student, or anyone else that may be affected by Nashville School of Law's current Covid policies and the in-person learning environment, we urge you to sign our petition. We have a simple solution, that has already been tested, that could help save lives, and we ask the school to employ it. We ask Nashville School of Law to allow virtual learning via zoom for any students that wish to learn that way. If we all do our part we can help save lives!