Wagner College announced on Thursday that, due to increasing rates of Covid infections in the surrounding community, it is suspending most in-person instruction for the remainder of the current semester and switching to remote instruction.
Wagner has been maintaining on-campus operations since July. The fall semester began on Aug. 24, and fall classes will end on Saturday, Nov. 21 in advance of Thanksgiving.
Exceptions to the switch to remote instruction are being made for a certain small number of lab and performance courses. Instructors for those courses have already contacted their students.
This means, of course, that commuter students will not be permitted on campus for the remainder of the semester, except those who’ve been informed that their lab and performance courses are still meeting in person.
Please note that students living on campus are not being asked to move out early. They will be able to continue living in their residence halls, and both the library and our dining facilities will remain open through the end of next week.
Resident students will not, however, be allowed to visit residence halls other than their own.
New York State has imposed two additional restrictions:
- No non-academic events involving 10 or more persons, indoors or outdoors, will be permitted.
- No more than four persons may eat together anywhere on campus at a single table.
The college will administer coronavirus tests to every employee and residential student next week in the Spiro Sports Center. Any change in the details of that program will be communicated directly to the campus community.
Wagner has maintained a very strong coronavirus testing program all semester, administering tests to all students every week and to most employees every other week. You will find the latest test results on our Covid-19 reporting dashboard, and we will continue to report the full results of our Covid testing program regularly and transparently by email and our dashboard.
We should note that one positive case reported yesterday yielded a larger number of potential exposures than previous positives. Students involved had participated in off-campus parties in which social distancing and mask wearing were not observed. Currently 40 students and 5 employees are in quarantine, while 7 students and 1 employee are in isolation. We expect additional test results over the weekend, and we will update the campus community if additional positives result. Those updated results will also be reflected on our Covid-19 reporting dashboard.
As a reminder, if you have not been contacted by the college, you do not meet the New York State definition of exposure.
Update: Monday, Nov. 16 — There were 392 coronavirus tests performed on campus last Thursday and Friday, Nov. 12 & 13, and no new coronavirus infections were discovered.