6/11 Weekly update: Safety and after hours help

Bottom Line, Up Front

  • Upcoming key dates or action items for families and/or students
  • Safety and WFU Police – general information
  • Don’t forget Cybersecurity! Top 5 Cyber-Secure Practices for students
  • Safety tasks for your students
  • How families can sign up for Campus Security Alerts
  • After Hours Help

Dear parents and families of incoming students,

It’s a brand new week, and time for our Weekly Update for new. This week, we are going to focus on issues of safety. But before we get there, we want to draw your attention to the following upcoming key dates and action items.

Upcoming key dates or action items for families and/or students

Here’s what you should know this week.

Safety and WFU Police – general information

  • Nothing is more important than the safety of our students and our campus. We have a Wake Forest University Police Department, which is comprised of professionally trained police officers, security officers, communications officers, and support staff. The primary role of the WFUPD is to protect and assist the campus community:
    • Wake Forest has a variety of methods to alert students in case of an emergency situation, including email, text, voicemail, indoor and outdoor alerts, and more.
    • Emergency call boxes [Map / PDF] are located throughout the campus. Push the button once to speak with a dispatcher. Telephone boxes are also located near some building entrances. Pick up the receiver, no dialing required. Tell the dispatcher about the suspicious activity or person, giving details about what you saw, the exact location and why it is suspicious.
    • We have Security Officers placed in various campus buildings. We also have Wake Forest University Police officers assigned as resource officers to individual residence halls and academic buildings, serving as liaison officers to students, faculty, and staff in those buildings. Off-duty Winston-Salem Police Officers conduct patrols on the perimeter of our campus.
    • At the start of each year, our Chief of Police sends out a campus safety reminder with tips on security resources.
    • Our WFUPD team is fortunate to have a great working relationship with the Winston-Salem Police Department and the Forsyth County Sheriff’s office. It’s important to note that jurisdiction for off campus violations is the purview of city police, not our campus police.
      • So if a student is an underage guest and gets cited for drinking underage at an off-campus party, they will have a city police problem AND a WFU Student Conduct problem. That is not a phone call you want to receive the weekend after you drop off your student for Orientation (“Hi, Dad. I got cited for underage possession by Winston-Salem police and I might need a lawyer…” (I have had students I know who had to make that call. Not fun.)
  • While Wake Forest takes many measures to promote safety, it is up to each of us to do our part to ensure safety too. We live in a small city, and Winston-Salem – like every other town or city – is not immune to crime. The unfortunate reality is that no amount of preparation or planning can make our campus and the surrounding area totally crime-proof.  Families, you can help us by talking to your students about safety:
    • Encourage your students to download the WakeSafe app and use it. With Wake Safe, you can use your cell phone as a personal security device that allows direct access to police, 911 emergency services, emergency location sharing, social escape (i.e., it allows students to get out of a tough social situation by calling their phone and giving them an excuse to leave), and a peer-to-peer Friend Walk tool (i.e., it sends your student’s location in real-time to a friend so they can watch as your student walks to their destination! They’ll watch your student and can trigger a call to emergency services if necessary).
    • Talk to your student about personal safety and crime prevention strategies. University Police has tips for students. Review these with your student and talk about the importance of situational awareness, the buddy system, and your behavioral expectations for them – in other words, if you would not want them walking alone on campus at 3 a.m., talk about that now before college starts.
    • Make sure your student knows if a crime happens, they should call 911 and report it to the police (not call you, or post it on social media). We need to have students go to the police first if something is happening so the police can be aware of it and act as needed.
    • Reinforce the idea that students should seek their safety information from the University or official local sources, and not social media (particularly anonymous sites like Fizz), which can be inaccurate.

Don’t forget Cybersecurity! Top 5 Cyber-Secure Practices for students

  1. Connect to secure wireless, including WFU’s own campus network, eduroam. 
  2. Install and run antivirus software to root out any lurking adware or malware, and set up a schedule of auto-scanning.
  3. Activate multi-factor for logins: Use Google 2-step or other two-factor authentication on all accounts.
  4. Protect information on social media that could be used in hacking efforts. Security questions often can be answered with research into your public digital life and photos. Encourage your student to take a hacker’s lens to your public information. 
  5. Lock down device data by using a passcode, password, faceID, or touchID to encrypt your devices and protect your info from getting into the wrong hands. 

You or your student can visit is.wfu.edu/infosec for more helpful cybersecurity guidance, and report concerning emails or other threats to our information security team at infosec@wfu.edu. 

Safety tasks for your students

  • Your students will be assigned some online Orientation courses August 1. These courses are meant to help them understand some common safety issues, including:
    • Alcohol and Other Substance Misuse Prevention (AlcoholEdu for College: Primary) 
    • Sexual Assault Prevention for Undergraduates (SAPU)
    • Hazing Prevention 
  • These online courses should be completed by your students by August 26.
  • There are also some additional safety tasks assigned to students(due August 16).
    • Register your mobile phone with Wake Ready. NOTE: Undergraduate students are required to provide their cell phone number. The process for students to update their cellphone number is here. Your student’s cell/mobile number must be in the “Cell (Mobile)” record field.
    • Download the WakeSafe app (strongly recommended)
    • Download Alertus, a tool that allows University Police to send a pop-up, full-screen laptop warning when immediate safety actions are needed. In the event of an emergency while they are in class and their cellphones are off/silenced, Alertus would allow a message to be seen on their laptop screen.
    • Register your property with University Police
  • Please do all you can to encourage your students to download the WakeSafe app and Alertus. Those tools can be incredibly useful in an emergency – but your students have to take action to download them.

How families can sign up for Campus Security Alerts

  • Campus Safety Alerts are not sent to families via email; families must download the WakeSafe app:
    • Search for and download the WakeSafe app on your mobile device in the app store
    • You will see a popup asking you to Allow Notifications. Tap Allow.

Once you have downloaded WakeSafe and enabled notifications, If a campus alert is issued, you will receive a notice on your mobile device.

  • How to verify you are correctly set up to receive alerts on your mobile phone:
  • In your Settings, go to WakeSafe and ensure that you have selected Allow Notifications (we encourage you to select Immediate notifications and to allow both Sounds and Badges).

After Hours Help

  • Most offices work on a Monday-Friday, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. schedule. If you have an urgent need to reach someone at the University because you have a concern that must be addressed quickly during a time that our offices are not open, use the following resources:
    • Emergency Response (24/7, year round) – University Police – 336.758.5911 for the kinds of emergencies where you would normally call 911 (e.g., immediate life and safety concerns)
    • Non-Emergency Response – 336-758-CARE (2273) is a service that ensures someone will always be available (i.e., 24/7 M-F, weekends and university holidays) to provide caring and thoughtful consultation services for Wake Forest students in need of mental health assistance or support
  • Other Resources

Parting thoughts

Your next message will come next Tuesday. In case you missed one of our weekly messages to families, they are all archived here.

With best wishes,

Betsy Chapman, Ph.D. (‘92, MA ‘94)
Executive Director of Family Communications

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