Updates on the Spring Semester

This morning, a message about our spring semester protocols was shared with the campus community. We wanted parents and families to be aware of this important information.

Thanks in large part to widespread cooperation with the booster-shot requirement announced on December 10, Wake Forest will be able to begin the Spring 2022 semester as scheduled with some additional precautions in place to mitigate the potential for COVID-19 transmission on campus.

We know there may be families coming to campus to help their students move in after the break. We ask that all family members wear a mask any time you are indoors and that you not come to campus if you are feeling sick or have recently been exposed to or tested positive for COVID-19.

You can read the full message here.

As a reminder, the University is still closed for Winter Break. We ask families to submit questions or share your thoughts via the Our Way Forward website, which is being checked regularly. Please do not contact the Student Health Service or other administrative or academic departments with questions that can wait until we reopen on January 4; the staff who are working over break are all deployed on the operational pieces of booster and flu compliance.

Please know that all feedback submitted through the Our Way Forward website and.or parents@wfu.edu is shared with our COVID leadership team (I am part of the process that checks those messages, and I promise you I share all of them). As always, we cannot promise an individual response, as we are receiving a lot of messages.

For students submitting their booster or flu documentation, we ask them NOT to email the Student Health Service to ask if we received their documentation. There is a self-service way for students to check their own status:

48 hours after submitting documentation, the status of a student’s vaccine documentation will be available in the Student Health Portal under My Profile > Immun. History. If they see the flu/influenza vaccine or COVID booster listed (along with the date they received it) on their Immun. History page, this means that their documentation has been reviewed and accepted, and they are in compliance with the policies.

If your Deac submitted an exemption request, the status of their exemption request will also be available in the Student Health Portal under My Profile > Immun. History. If they see a medical or religious exemption listed on their Immun. History page for the flu vaccine or COVID booster, this means that their exemption request has been reviewed and accepted. If they do not see that, they should check their Secure Messages within the Student Health portal.

We’ll go back to pre-scheduled blogs for the rest of the week, but I wanted to bring this news about the spring to you as soon as I had it.

— by Betsy Chapman, Ph.D. (’92, MA ’94)