Items

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  2020-06-02

  Hope Turns to Disappointment: Starkey Reopens...Then Closes Again

  As spring gave way to summer in 2020, Starkey gradually opened its day programs for its persons-served in phases, so as to ensure their safety as much as possible. These emails dated June 2 to July 14, 2020, offer a look into a seemingly steady and successful reopening process, while illustrating the patchwork nature of Kansas's reopening, and how individual entities charted their own course while following the state's suggested guidelines. Perhaps most tellingly, the final email conveys the sudden pullback brought about by the virus's continued surge, when the day programs closed yet again due to rapidly rising COVID-19 cases in Sedgwick County, Kansas. Taken together, these items give substance to a quickly deteriorating situation that came to characterize the COVID-19 experience in Sedgwick County during the COVID summer of 2020.
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  2020-06-15

  Connections Newsletter: How a Special Needs Community Weathers the COVID-19 Storm

  Given the unique challenges presented by COVID-19, special needs programs, such as Starkey, Inc. in Wichita, Kansas, needed to make equally unique adaptations so as to safeguard an already vulnerable community. This Connections newsletter from the summer of 2020 highlights some of those adaptations from early in the pandemic. These included local food donations to the various residences, the closure of day programs, homemade mask-making drives to make up for the mask shortage, and even visits from wildlife experts from a local zoo, who brought with them a sloth, a lynx, and a penguin for the residents to enjoy. Overall, this source provides a more in-depth look into how a community like Starkey dealt with the virus's early outbreak in ways that had to be uniquely suited to the needs of those they served.
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  2020-03-16

  Starkey, Inc During the Pandemic: How a Kansas Special Needs Community Responded to COVID-19

  This series of emails from March through May of 2020 details the measures taken by Starkey, a Wichita, Kansas, adult special needs community living program, to safeguard their vulnerable residents from infection. Among the topics covered in this set are protective measures, social distancing, day program closures, containment of COVID outbreaks in the residencies, and Starkey's phased plan for gradually returning their community members (known as "persons-served" in the documents) to a semblance of normalcy. Moreover, these emails provide a glimpse into how individual businesses and essential services reacted and adjusted to Kansas's statewide directives.