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After reading the story of a former University of Maine student who was placed on academic suspension – which the student attributes to a bank mix-up – a Houlton man offered more than $900 to help the student work his way back into school. The two have never met in person.
John Marshall, 19, graduated with honors from Foxcroft Academy and came to the university in fall 2007. He hoped to keep his focus on school and getting a business or international affairs degree.
“I was the first kid to go to college in my family,” Marshall said. “I wanted to push myself to do well.”
A few weeks into the school year, Marshall said one of his friends told him something that took his focus off school – police and the university were looking for information about him.
Police asked the university to post a notice to FirstClass, which included a photograph of an individual they wanted to contact in order to investigate a suspected fraudulent withdrawal from an ATM. Marshall’s friends recognized him as the man in the picture.
Marshall said he contacted the police and the bank soon after. He found that the University Credit Union made a mistake when entering data, making it appear that Marshall was drawing money from someone else’s account.
A UCU employee hit a wrong key when entering information into the bank’s coding system, which caused the mix-up, according to UCU President Matt Walsh.
UCU employees made several attempts to contact Marshall by phone and e-mail when they discovered their error on the same day it occurred, Walsh said. They did not hear from Marshall until he learned police were trying to find him.
Police informed the university there had been a mistake, and the university deleted the online photographs. Marshall said the posting was placed in two folders on FirstClass. One was taken down within a few hours. The other was up for almost two weeks, according to Marshall. The university said it was taken down within eight hours.
The bank apologized to Marshall and corrected the error in their system.
“This whole thing was very unfortunate and could have been avoided had things worked out differently, but mistakes do happen,” Walsh said. “We did everything in our power to correct it as quickly as possible.”
“It was a frustrating experience,” Marshall said. He said the situation caused a lot of stress because people looked at him differently after his image had been tied to the police investigation. Sorting out the error took up a great deal of his time, he said, and problems with his family’s living situation added even more stress.
The bank mix-up, police queries and home problems during those first few months of school hindered Marshall’s studies. “I was focusing a lot of energy on this for a couple of months, and my grades really started to suffer,” Marshall said. His grades have not recovered.
“After I failed calculus and got Cs in pretty much everything else, I got put on academic probation in the second half of the year, and it was just too much pressure on top of everything else,” Marshall said. “The stress got to be too much for me, and I couldn’t dig myself out.”
Marshall passed calculus in high school and graduated with a 3.2 grade point average. In his first year at UMaine, his GPA fell below 1.4 and the university informed him over the summer that he would be placed on academic suspension and could not return this semester.
Marshall appealed his suspension over the summer, citing extenuating personal circumstances that caused his falling grades, but the appeal was denied.
According to the undergraduate student catalog, “appeals which explain extenuating circumstances (health problems, family emergencies, etc.) beyond the student’s control and which affected academic performance will be brought to the Academic Standing Appeals Committee, which will decide upon them.”
The committee did not find sufficient circumstances to reinstate Marshall as a full-time student.
Stuart Marrs, associate provost for undergraduate education, oversees this committee.
“We’re always thinking about what is best for the student in the long run,” Marrs said. “Sometimes the best thing for them is to have a semester off to focus on a particular course and get their grade up.”
He could not talk about Marshall’s specific case because of federal privacy laws, but he stressed that “all of these processes aren’t punitive. They’re in place to ensure the academic success of the student.”
Marrs suggested that Marshall take calculus online this semester. If he did well, the committee would reconsider letting him back into school. Marshall could not afford the $964 course fee.
As the school year closed in, The Bangor Daily News published an article about Marshall’s situation. Stan Ginish, a 56-year-old and former Navy SEAL, read about Marshall’s plight and picked up the phone.
He called Marshall and his elderly mother, offering to pay the course fee. In exchange, Ginish asked that Marshall keep him updated on how the course was going. Marshall and Ginish have still not met face-to-face.
“[His story] just struck me,” Ginish said. “I spent my labor day weekend contacting people at the university to see what I could do and if I could move the paperwork and such along.”
Ginish said he felt Marshall was “just a kid who needed a second chance.”
“If you cry out for help, there is someone out there, someplace willing to listen to you and maybe even help you,” Ginish said.
For now, Marshall said he is focusing on doing well in his calculus class while he looks for a job and trains for a marathon coming up at the end of the month. He hopes to take advantage of his chance at redemption.
“I’m pretty grateful and pretty overwhelmed that someone who doesn’t even know me would stick their neck out like that to give someone like me a second chance,” Marshall said.
