College comes with its share of challenges with perhaps the principal of these challenges being those of a financial nature.
Some Winthrop University students had difficulty getting paid last semester, with some staff members of The Anthology — Winthrop’s yearly literary and arts magazine — not getting paid at all.
Téa Franco, The Anthology’s editor-in-chief for 2019-2020, was one of these students. She said that a lot of the problems involving the staff were likely the result of “miscommunication.”
“It makes sense because [Assistant Dean of Students Miranda Knight] is [in the DiGiorgio Campus Center] and payroll is all the way in Tillman,” Franco said. “It’s all emails and phone calls…I’m sure it’s hard to keep up with and there’s not enough employees at Winthrop right now.”
Knight said last semester she took over being the “business-side advisor for student publications” which was “new” to her and following the retirement of Bethany Marlowe, taking on that role required a “very quick turnaround” and was “a lot to learn” in a short amount of time. She also said that student hiring was “totally changed” with the implementation of the online application system.
“I had to learn it,” Knight said, adding that this process was exacerbated by the office of the Dean of Students being “short-staffed.”
“Trying to do that with the rest of my job, [it] just took a long time,” Knight said.
Franco said that student publications’ graduate associate was communicating some of the information about the issues with payment early on in the semester but she said that The Anthology’s staff was not in the student publications office very often last semester. She said that she was waiting for the new applications but by September, the staff still had not received them.
According to Franco, communication about the applications ceased temporarily in October, when the “semester started picking up.”
“[The Anthology staff] didn’t get our applications until right before Thanksgiving break,” Franco said, adding that they were told to get their applications done before the break began.
Alyssa Washington, editor-in-chief of the Roddey McMillan Record for 2019-2020, said that the staff for the RMR did not get paid until October and that even when payment started coming in, there were still problems.
“Payment with student publications was very much a struggle this semester and still is,” Washington wrote in an email to The Johnsonian. “Our staff didn’t start getting paid until mid-October and even then our stipends were not correct and not everyone was receiving a check. Student activities staff went in twice and made corrections.”
Franco said that trying to get a staff of people that — up until that point — was not having regular meetings to get paperwork done presented a challenge. She said that when she went to fill out her application, some of the information was correct but other parts of the application were incorrect, including her job title as it was listed on the application. Furthermore, there was no application for The Anthology’s assistant editor.
Franco said that she eventually went to meet with Knight — who sent her the application for the assistant editor — but “at that point, that was the last day of finals when I talked to her because that’s the only day I was able to.” Franco added that Knight was “apparently” unaware that The Anthology’s staff was not in the system.
Knight said that it took time “to get the job description up.”
“There were times where I thought I did it correctly and then it’s sitting there and I didn’t know that, I thought it was good,” Knight said. “Until I hear from people ‘hey, I didn’t get paid,’ I didn’t realize it.”
According to Franco, The Anthology’s staff is not being paid in accordance with information that they had previously been given.
“We were supposed to get paid on Christmas Eve and then we didn’t and then that was when [I decided] to go talk to payroll,” Franco said. “We were all under the impression that we were going to get all of our money for last semester before this semester and we didn’t and we’re not going to. We’re going to get paid the money we’re owed but basically, we’re getting a double-stipend this semester.”
Washington said that the RMR staff is experiencing ongoing issues when it comes to getting paid but at least one of those issues is supposed to be “fixed this semester.”
“I understand pay being off for a few weeks due to new staffing in the student activities office but waiting a few months to receive a check and then it still not being the correct amount is ridiculous,” Washington said.
Knight said that there were “hundreds” of students whose applications had to be put through the new system and that other departments faced similar challenges. She said that the sheer number of students who had to have their information entered into the system played a role in the problem as well as personnel changes that have occurred since last semester.
“We had a new admin in [the office] and we had a new admin over in student activities which used to do the payroll piece for student publications and so we had new people learning all of this stuff and doing what two people did before,” Knight said. “Now, that one person who was doing what two experienced people were doing, it was all new…it was a lot on top of somebody’s normal job.”
Knight said that the new admins who have been hired are learning the new system and that the process “will be faster and easier” in the future. She took responsibility for the problems regarding students not getting paid and said that the problems with student employees getting paid was a “mixture” of factors which culminated in a “perfect storm.”
