Food pantry, dining services remain open during COVID-19 crisis

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Brittany Hively

In addition to their food pantry, Drinko Library offers hand sanitizer stations and recommends practicing social distancing on campus. Dining services such as Harless Dining Hall, Chick-fil-A and Starbucks will remain open.

Marshall University’s food pantry will remain open during the period of non-face-to-face classes, though it will close during the originally scheduled spring break. 

It is open Mondays from 1:30-3:30 p.m. and Tuesdays from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.

“We are committed to keeping the pantry open during the COVID-19 crisis,” Kelli Williams, chair of the department of dietetics, said. “We don’t want any students or community members to go hungry during this time of uncertainty and we will do all we can to assist. We have a lot of food on hand, and there is a good variety of fresh and shelf stable foods.”

Marshall’s Drinko Library has a pop-up food pantry available for students to stop by and take what they may need. It will be open when the library is open, and staff will keep refilling it until all food is gone. There are also hand sanitizer stations, and, according to Marshall Libraries’ social media, “We have plenty of room for you to spread out and keep your distance.”

The library staff is encouraging social distancing and avoiding crowded areas. 

Hours are 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. for Drinko Library and its upper floors. 

Marshall dining services are also limited but still open. According to the Marshall dining services website, Sodexo has been managing its technical response to COVID-19 weeks before it appeared in the U.S. “based on the experiences of our teams working in health care settings in Wuhan Province China.”

“We take our responsibility for the well-being of the communities we serve seriously and want to share with you the contingency measures we are taking to keep the communities we serve and our employees safe,” the Sodexo website states. “In partnership with the University’s Business Continuity Plan, the advice of local health authorities and the CDC, we developed a business continuity plan for each of our universities here in the U.S.”

Harless Dining Hall hours are breakfast from 9-10:30 a.m., lunch from 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.; and dinner from 4-6 p.m. for the weeks of March 16-20 and through March 23-27. For weekend dining service at Harless, hours are 11:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m. for brunch and dinner is 4-6 p.m. Dining hours after March 29 will be posted no later than March 27

Chick-fil-A is open Monday-Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Starbucks is open Monday through Friday from 8-10:30 a.m. All other retail options on campus are closed.

Amanda Larch can be contacted at [email protected].