Dear UF community,

Alachua County mandated emergency "stay at home" orders effective at midnight, Monday, March 23. UF is reducing on-campus personnel to those identified as essential, starting today. If you are unsure about whether this includes you, your manager will be able to provide you with guidance and more details about what this entails.

If you have been approved to work from home, please do so. If you have been identified as essential and your job requires you to remain on campus, please practice social distancing, maintaining at least a 6-foot distance between yourself and others whenever possible. The University of Florida is firmly committed to prioritizing our community’s health and safety to the greatest extent possible.

Beginning Tuesday, March 24, UF will provide employees who are unable to work on campus and unable to work from home with 10 days of paid emergency sick leave, pro-rated based on full-time equivalency. This leave will be provided to faculty, staff, OPS, postdocs and graduate assistants, and is to be used as needed by employees who are affected. Detailed guidance on how the emergency paid sick leave may be used, when needed, as well as time reporting will be provided later this week, and further details will be posted to UFHR's Working through COVID-19 website as soon as they are available. The leave provision is granted as part of the federal Families First Coronavirus Relief Act.

We are deeply grateful to the faculty and staff working tirelessly in our clinical operations to lead us through this crisis. We also send our heartfelt thanks to the Student Affairs, College of Veterinary Medicine, University Police Department, Facilities Services and other personnel who remain on campus to support our students who are unable to leave and to attend to our critical daily operations. Classes continue to be taught remotely, and other important university business continues.

Vice President for Research David Norton is sending to the research community information on how these changes affect our research enterprise and those who support it. UF’s administration will continue to evaluate next steps beyond this two-week period, and we are committed to providing you with updates on a regular basis.

Answers to questions are available on the Faculty and Staff FAQ section of UF’s COVID-19 website, which will continue to be updated. If there are other questions not answered here, we encourage you to email humanresources@ufl.edu.

These are unprecedented times for all of us, but we are a strong and resilient community that will rise to meet this challenge. By working together and caring for one another, we will continue to navigate this difficult period with strength and determination.

Stay healthy and stay in touch,

Dr. Charles E. Lane, Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer
Jodi D. Gentry, Vice President for Human Resources