Student fee refunds; summer camps; new COVID-19 fundraising

Student fees refunds
 
As certain services are no longer being delivered on campus, the university is making changes to some supplemental fees for students.

There will be no Athletics and Recreation Activity fees for courses that run through May to August. In addition, students who paid the student services fee for Athletics and Recreation Activity at the beginning of the school year will receive a refund for the May through August time period. Fees will continue to apply for student services that are being offered and are readily available in a virtual environment, such as the Student Wellness Centre and the Student Success Centre.

Credits will be applied to any debt on a student’s account or credited to next year, unless the student requests a refund. More information about fees is available on the registrar’s office COVID-19 website.

Refunds are also being provided to students in residence who completed all necessary steps to move out at any time between March 13 and March 21, 2020 — the time from when all in-person classes were cancelled, through to the final move-out day for residence.

Students are also receiving parking refunds for those who prepaid parking. The refund covers half of the month of March and any subsequent months while the university is providing only essential services and conducting essential research. This credit may be applied against parking fees for the upcoming 20/21 academic year. For more information, go to: https://parking.mcmaster.ca/documents/webpost%20parking%20refunds%200420.pdf

McMaster COVID-19 Fund

McMaster is meeting the extraordinary challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic with a new fundraising campaign aimed at supporting our students and our researchers, who are working around the clock to bring brighter days.

The McMaster COVID-19 Fund has two arms – a Student Emergency Relief Fund and a COVID-19 Research Fund. Donors are invited to support McMaster students, researchers or both. The goal of this eight-week campaign is to raise funds for immediate student relief and COVID-19 research.

For each of these funds, the first $100,000 will be matched to double the impact of these gifts. Donors are also invited to send messages of support to students and researchers as part of this campaign.

Donations to the Student Emergency Relief Fund are being used for necessities like food and shelter and mental health support. Funding also supports the continued costs of repatriating students from international research assignments or field-work locations and helping them make it home.

The COVID-19 Research Fund provides immediate additional funding to support discoveries and advances in McMaster’s COVID-19 research.
 
McMaster summer camps cancelled

The decision to cancel this summer’s in-person camps at McMaster was not an easy one to make. The university knows that the camp experience is an important one for children and counsellors and welcoming campers to campus has been a McMaster tradition for so many years.

However, social distancing requirements remains in place and at the end of last week the federal government indicated that the need to keep physically distant will likely continue to the end of the summer.

The university had already determined that its spring and summer academic programs would be in virtual classrooms with no students coming to campus. And so the decision was regrettably made that all in-person summer camps at McMaster scheduled for this summer are cancelled. Any fees paid will be refunded. A few camps are exploring options for online summer camp programming but these are still in development.