To: Wellesley College Faculty and Staff
From: President Paula A. Johnson
Re: Our Multilayered Approach to Health and Safety at Wellesley This Fall
Date: August 25, 2021
As we all prepare to come back to campus over the next two weeks, I want to take this opportunity to explain the thinking and the science that are informing our health and safety approach. Senior leadership, along with our health and safety and facilities teams, has been working hard to prepare for the start of the semester since May. We are hosting a webinar for faculty and staff tomorrow at 2 p.m. to lay out our approach and give you a chance to ask questions.
Our top priorities this year are to provide an outstanding academic and residential experience for our students and to protect the health and safety of our community. The pandemic is still with us, but unlike last year at this time, we know much more about the virus and, most importantly, we have vaccines, the most powerful tool at our disposal. Though they are not perfect, they are making it possible to once again offer our students in-person instruction and bring members of our community back to campus to continue the important work of the College.
Vaccines are highly successful at preventing illness, hospitalization, and death, even with the Delta variant, and they significantly reduce the chances of contracting or transmitting the virus. However, we now understand that COVID-19, and particularly the Delta variant, demands a multilayered approach. The pillars of our strategy include mandatory vaccinations; testing our entire campus community weekly; wearing masks in all administrative and academic buildings and classrooms; limiting the number of visitors to our campus buildings; limiting indoor gatherings among members of our community and requiring masks at larger outdoor gatherings. Data from peer institutions that have been surveillance testing a large number of students, faculty, and staff through the summer show no classroom transmission of the Delta variant when the precautions we are all taking are followed.
The vaccination rate for our students is 99.5 percent. The overall compliance rate for students, faculty, administrative and union staff is 98 percent. Our human resources team is still working hard to improve our vaccination rates for faculty and staff even further. Vaccination is the backbone of our health and safety approach, and I applaud our community for achieving these numbers.
Wellesley will require booster vaccinations as soon as they are available, and we will be following up monthly with students, faculty, and staff to ensure compliance.
Even with near-total vaccination rates, we know we need to expect some positive cases. As the leader of the Massachusetts Higher Education Testing Working Group, I have been reviewing the science regarding the variants, most recently the Delta variant, for months. The group has long understood that due to the increased transmissibility of any variant, surveillance testing is critical to allow us to quickly identify asymptomatic positive cases and limit exposure. As we have learned more about the specifics of the Delta variant, the modeling has informed our recommendations and our practices here at Wellesley.
The key to effective surveillance testing is broad community participation. Everyone needs to be tested weekly. Tests will be analyzed in groups of 10, which is called “pooled” testing. When a pool tests positive, all 10 members of that testing group must be retested so that if there is a positive case, it can be identified right away. This will allow us to limit exposure.
If you are part of a group that receives a positive pooled test, that doesn’t mean you have COVID-19. Most of the people in a pool are likely to be negative. Follow-up individual testing with two types of tests, a rapid antigen test and an individual PCR test, will allow us to confirm the positive case or cases. The rapid antigen test results are available in 15 minutes, and the result is confirmed by the gold standard, the PCR test, which will return the next day.
It is important that we continue to wear masks in classrooms and offices. I know many faculty were hoping to teach unmasked, and we may get there eventually, but right now we need to wear masks when we gather and work together. It is also critical that we do not go to work or class while experiencing symptoms, but instead fill out the symptom tracker and await further direction from a health care provider. We will be requiring the flu vaccine for our students and we urge all faculty and administrative and union staff to be vaccinated against flu this season. We will be holding multiple flu vaccination clinics on campus for students, faculty and staff.
In addition to establishing these health and safety protocols, we have assessed and improved the ventilation in our buildings. We are also providing tents for faculty and staff who want to teach or meet outside.
Also, we are asking our community to limit the number of guests in campus buildings and to only invite those with College business. That might include guest speakers or lecturers, job candidates, or others who are visiting with a specific purpose that requires an in-person meeting. All guests will need to register and show proof of vaccination. Guests will not be allowed in residence halls at the start of the semester; we will revisit this guidance in October. As outlined in Piper Orton’s memo yesterday, our campus will remain closed to the general public at least for the next few weeks.
The pandemic is not going away anytime soon, but with our multilayered approach, we can protect our community while providing a rigorous and inspiring education to our students. As Provost Shennan, Dean Jeffries, and Dean Núñez reminded us in their thoughtful memo, many of this year’s students have not set foot in a classroom with peers and teachers for 18 months. We know that the pandemic has significantly disrupted many students’ intellectual and emotional development. It is critical that they return to classrooms and residential spaces, and our protocols make it possible for us to offer them this experience in a way that protects the health of our faculty and staff. Our students also learn in places and spaces outside the classroom, and every member of our community is directly or indirectly important to achieving our mission. This is our responsibility. This is what we do.
Our approach also allows us to be back on campus together, to see our students and each other, to collaborate, to innovate, and to experience the joys of being part of this wonderful and diverse Wellesley community. This is who we are.
We will continue to share information about health and safety, including updates on positive cases in our community, on our Keeping Wellesley Healthy website and dashboard, which will be updated daily starting next week. We will use that information, as well as data from the state and the CDC, to continually assess the situation. If we see a significant uptick in cases either on campus or in the state, we will be ready to respond with actions that could include increasing the frequency of testing, moving to remote instruction for short periods, or tightening our off-campus travel guidance for students, staff, and faculty.
I am confident in our approach and in our community’s ability to do what we must to have a healthy, fulfilling year. I look forward to speaking with many of you tomorrow at the webinar, and I thank you for your patience and understanding as we work out all the details to ensure a successful start to the semester.
