On Tuesday, Jan. 29, students, faculty and staff attended a town hall sponsored by the Council of Student Leaders. Students were encouraged to ask questions and air grievances regarding dining services, financial aid, campus police and other issues.
Representing financial aid was Michelle Hare, Director of Financial Aid. Lieutenant Charles Yearta represented campus police. Council of Student Leaders (CSL) Chair and Vice Chair, Ximena Perez-Velazco and Jared Garrett, represented CSL. No representative for dining services was in attendance. The town hall was moderated by Dr. John Holder, professor of political science.
Financial Aid
Many students took issue with the office of financial aid, saying they felt overlooked and there was a lack of concern for their situations.
“I certainly want to say that I’m very sorry to hear that anyone thinks we have a lack of concern in any way, shape, or form. That is not our intention,” Hare said.
Hare said often times students will wait until August to visit the office of financial aid to discuss tuition and scholarships. According to her, this is too late. By that time, all the office is able to offer students are loans.
In order to prepare for cost of the next semester, students should use the office of financial aid estimate of tuition to get an idea of payment.
“We will be putting out there, by April, an estimate of what next year’s costs will be. They won’t be exact, because the Board of Trustees creates the cost in the summer, but we’re really close,” Hare said.
“You can use this years award package, next year’s cost and get a really close estimate so you know what you’re looking at and we can start having those discussions now. You can use the summer to get a summer job and at least make a dent in the books,” Hare said.
Hare also encouraged looking for scholarships before the semester ends. Scholarships for specific colleges, such as the college of education, can be found on their websites.
“We’re working on getting a database on our website for any private scholarships that we hear about. We’re hoping to have that ready by the end of spring,” Hare said.
Campus Security
Campus security was a hot topic of the night. Winthrop University Police Department offers an escort service for students who feel unsafe traveling around campus and the surrounding areas at night. Campus police patrol zone encompasses a two-to-three mile radius around campus.
Campus police also employs an app called LiveSafe. This app allows users to communicate directly with campus police through their cell phone.
“LiveSafe allows you to instantly communicate with the police department via text, via phone call, via email, however you want to work it. We’ve had a lot of success with that app,” Yearta said.
There is also a “safe walk feature” in the app that gives another user access to your location to virtually assist you on your journey until you have arrived safely to your destination.
“If you have this app, if you open it, you can text your friend who also has the app, it will send them a message that you’re doing a safe walk and you want them to follow you. It’ll show your GPS coordinates as you walk and it’ll send alerts to campus police and the person watching you if there’s some trouble going on,” Yearta said.
Another popular issue of the night was parking. Students feel there is a lack of resident parking on campus. Students also took issue with the appeals system for tickets.
Yearta said campus police is working on a way to review the ticket appeals process, but has not had much success yet.
“Unfortunately, the police department does not have unilateral say on policy and procedures at Winthrop University. It requires the Board of Trustees to sign off on changing that. At this point, we have not been very successful with that. We are constantly looking to change that, though,” Yearta said.
Yearta said the police department is working to take the tickets to an online payment system to minimize unnecessary travel between the cashiers office in Tillman and the police department.
“The other part of that is we’re looking to take that to an online system to where it would be more user friendly and take up less of your time going from cashiers to the police department. That is a struggle for us,” Yearta said.
Yearta also spoke about the number of parking spots on campus. There are 931 faculty and staff parking spots and 3,003 student parking spots.
“There are more parking spaces than students registered on campus. We are looking at adding parking areas to small plots of land that we own. However, as with unfortunately everything that we sometimes do, we would have to get approval from the university to pave these lots, mark these lots, bumper these lots and things like that. That costs more money,” Yearta said.
Campus Climate
Ximena Perez-Velazco, Chair of CSL, and Jared Garrett, Vice Chair of CSL addressed concerns about student-administration relations. Some questions from the audience suggested a disconnect between the two.
Garrett said the purpose of CSL is to voice student concerns to administration and faculty.
“Administration isn’t always aware of all the concerns that students have on campus. It is about 5,000 of us. It would be hard for certain amount of people to have all of these concerns that need to be addressed, but CSL is here for each student on campus to make sure that you guys are heard and make sure that your issues and concerns are being taken care of,” Garrett said.
Perez-Velazco said one of the weaknesses of CSL has been a lack of availability to the student body at large, but through recent restructuring of the organization this has improved.
“One mission of this particular year is to start internally and kind of restructure ourselves and make ourselves more available to students. Based on the student response rate to our availability, that is something that I feel like we’ve met at least at a 75 percent goal rate,” Perez-Velazco said.
Perez-Velazco serves as the student representative to the Board of Trustees. She and Garrett also meet monthly with Dr. Mahony to communicate student concerns.
“On a larger spectrum of things, we work very hard to work as liaisons between the Board of Trustees, professors, the higher ups and beyond that, our state legislative level, that’s something we take a lot of pride in our city engagement committee,” Perez-Velazco said.
Dining Services
Bryan Harriss, director of dining services, was scheduled to answer questions and concerns around Sodexo but was absent.
