IC News

Welcome back IC for the Fall 2022 semester! I am so excited to welcome our students, faculty, and staff back for what I hope is truly a remarkable academic year.  

It is hard to imagine but just two and half years ago we were hit hard by COVID-19; and it is still with us. While we have seen a spike of COVID-19 on our campus I believe with continued public health practices we can keep our campus healthy. As I saw students moving back to campus, there was so many smiling faces and such joy in the air. My commitment to you once again is making sure we are all healthy and safe this upcoming academic year so we can keep the joy alive for this campus community! 

Before I dive into some updates for the fall semester, I want to reflect on what’s been accomplished and lessons learned from the past. Our return to face-to-face instruction and the full Ithaca College experience was tremendously successful last academic year. We took extra steps in our public health policies such as face coverings indoors, frequent hand hygiene, and responsible social interactions.  

All these things helped us navigate the 2021-2022 semester with a low incidence of COVID-19 within our community. Additionally, our extremely high compliance with vaccination requirements also helped ensure that most cases of COVID-19 that did occur at IC were extremely mild. We know these specific tools worked in helping to contain the harshest impacts of the pandemic.  

I encourage us to commit ourselves once again to good public health practices, including strongly encouraging mask wearing indoors as we begin a new academic year. 

At this time, most of our students, faculty, and staff have received at least their primary series of COVID-19 vaccines. Many of our campus community members have also received at least one booster shot. As we look to the weeks ahead, we know that new and improved booster shots will become available for our campus community to combat COVID-19 and the highly contagious BA.4 and BA.5 variants.  

I strongly recommend that when these boosters become available that all our campus community members get one as soon as possible. As noted from our own experiences, these vaccines helped us maintain low incidences of COVID-19 and relatively mild cases when they did pop up. Receiving a vaccine and staying up to date on booster doses continues to be the single-best way to prevent serious illness because of COVID-19.  

More details about boosters and flu shots will become available in the coming weeks.  

It’s important that students, faculty, and staff know when and where to get tested.   

Symptomatic testing for students continues to be available at Boothroyd Hall. Testing will be available during the hours of Monday-Friday, 8:30 a.m.- 5 p.m. and Saturday-Sunday, 12 p.m. – 4 p.m. Employees will also now be able to utilize on campus testing at Boothroyd hall during the hours mentioned. Testing is free of charge for all campus community members. Other local testing options include pharmacies, urgent care facilities, or the Cayuga Health System’s testing site at The Shops at Ithaca Mall.  

Anyone can direct questions about testing options to caremanager@ithaca.edu.  

Ithaca College continues to monitor the worldwide spread of monkeypox. We have recently seen cases throughout our local community and policies have been developed to help contain any spread that may advance on our campus. To keep our campus community safe and up to date on the latest guidance and information, we have launched a new public health website. This new website integrates our previous COVID-19 website and further expands on new topics such as monkeypox. I encourage all of our community members to check out this website for the latest information on all things related to public health.