Dear Service Learning Students,

As the university announced, in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19 or the coronavirus, Marquette’s courses have moved online until further notice.  As such, we have made the difficult decision to suspend service learning for the remainder of the semester. Many of our students are working with vulnerable populations in nursing homes and hospitals and could potentially spread the virus or be exposed while they are in the community. We have received calls from agencies who are needing to close their programs to outside volunteers or cancel programs. Please also see Marquette's coronavirus (COVID-19) main resource.

As such, please read the following directions for service learning students:

• Service learning has been suspended for the remainder of the semester.
• If you are in a class that keeps a timesheet and has an hour requirement for service learning, we have made the recommendation to our service learning faculty that hours requirements can be more flexible because of the virus. Your faculty member will let you know of their expectations and adapted plans. Individual faculty will make their own decisions for their classes, but generally, we are making the recommendation that if a student has at least 8 hours of service that can be verified at their placement, though not ideal, the student should be able to complete the remaining service learning reflections and assignments. If a student has less than 8 hours, then they likely did not have a significant enough of an experience and should be given an alternative assignment. Again, more information will be given by your professor.
• Please be in contact with your student coordinator from the Service Learning Program, the site contact from your agency, AND your professor so that everyone is on the same page. We have emailed faculty and community partners will also be made aware of these changes, but a note of departure to your agencies is a professional courtesy.
• Please have your site contact send you and your student coordinator an email verifying how many hours you were able to complete, and make sure you have entered all of your hours as “impacts” in MUEngage so you can receive hours for the time you completed. Once our staff receives this email confirmation, we can verify your hours.

If you have any questions that your student coordinator or faculty member cannot help you with, please contact Tyanna McLaurin, assistant director, at tyanna.mclaurin@marquette.edu or Kim Jensen Bohat, program director, at kimberly.jensen@marquette.edu. 

Thanks for your help and patience in this process! We apologize that your semester has been disrupted in this way. Be sure to continue to watch your email for updates from Marquette as this situation continues to evolve.

Kim Jensen Bohat

Director