A series of town hall meetings centered on student concerns about how the new academic year will progress will be hosted by the university June 1 through June 19.

This past spring semester was affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and Marshall President Jerome Gilbert suspended in-person classes for the rest of the semester in mid-March. All classes from then till the end of the semester were switched to online.

Tiffany Davis is the Digital Marketing Manager at the Office of Communications and has worked with Student Affairs as well as all the individual colleges to organize the meetings.

Davis said the speakers at the meetings will focus on talking about the possible changes that could happen on campus this fall.

“There’s a lot of different groups meeting and discussing different possibilities so that our students can return to campus safely this fall,” Davis said. “[They will discuss] things like classroom setups or what events or organizations will look like.”

Davis said students can fill out a registration form that is available on MyMU and was sent out in a recent Herd Happenings email.

“From there, students can choose what college they belong to and sign up to join their session,” Davis said.

Davis said the events will take place through Microsoft Teams, and the students will receive an email with a link to their event on the day it happens. Students will be able to listen to updates from their deans and representatives of their colleges and representatives from Student Affairs. They will be able to ask questions during an interactive Q&A session at the end of each meeting.

Davis said the meetings will be a great way for students to voice any concerns they have and to get answers to questions they have regarding what changes are coming to campus.

“There might be a lot of things we may not have answers to right now, so we may say ‘Here’s some possibilities, and as soon as we know, we’ll follow up,’” Davis said.

Students will receive information from their colleges on what day their virtual town hall meetings will be hosted. Students in each college can get information about these days on their college’s website or social media page.

Jonathan Still can be contacted at [email protected].