Community Council reviews party registration

During its meetings on Nov. 2 and 8, Community Council reviewed the Public Safety Department’s role on campus, as well as policies surrounding student print quotas and the party registration process.

On Nov. 2, the Council hosted Associate Dean of the College and Director of Public Safety Lisa Boudah along with Assistant Director of Public Safety Dan Gaiotti to address concerns about vandalism, party registration and parking, among other topics.
They also discussed the sober friend policy, which is now in its second year. The policy states that if an intoxicated student cannot care for him or herself but an officer determines that the student does not require immediate medical attention, the officer will then encourage the student to reach out to a sober friend to offer care.  Boudah and Gaiotti felt that this system has been working well.

The officers emphasized the importance of the awareness of this policy among Residential Life staff in the wake of the closing of the Health Center at night.
In order to address the problem of vandalism, the Council expressed a need to emphasize peer-to-peer responsibility among students. The Council stressed the importance of students notifying offices about any issue both to maintain the integrity of the community and to avoid fines to a large group of students.

During its Nov. 8 meeting, the Council hosted Dean of Library and Information Services (LIS) Mike Roy to discuss the financial concerns surrounding student print quotas.  Under the current policy, first-years, sophomores and juniors can print 500 pages per semester free of charge, while seniors are allotted 1,000 pages. After exceeding their quota, students are charged five cents per single-sided page.  All unused pages are rolled over from the previous semesters.
Roy explained that these quota numbers were developed to cover 80 percent of a student’s printing.

“We built it around the premise that students would pay for 20 percent of their printing, assuming they printed at the same level,” said Roy.

Roy estimated that this would average a student cost of $10 per semester.  However, since implementing the policy last spring, pages printed dropped from eight million in the 2008-2009 academic year to six million 2009-2010 academic year, thereby shrinking LIS’s estimated student contribution to 10 percent.

Students on financial aid can contact student financial services to seek approval for supporting additional printing costs. The awarded aid is handled on a case-by-case basis.

“I think it’s good that we don’t keep it that cut-and-dry and that we try to treat each case carefully,” Dean of the College and Council Co-Chair Shirley Collado remarked. “We want students to feel comfortable reaching out to student financial services for help and approval if they need it.”

The Council then consulted Associate Dean of Students Doug Adams on the issue of party registration.  Council member Zach Hitchcock ’13 expressed concerns over the reoccurring issue of Public Safety often breaking up parties on campus. The Council also sought to clarify the specific nature of the shared responsibility between Public Safety and the party host.

“Significant responsibility is placed on the student hosting the party,” explained Adams.
Social hosts, students responsible for hosting a registered party, must complete a Party Registration Workshop.  These workshops must be completed annually and are held weekly during the first six weeks of school and every other week afterwards. In accordance with Vermont state law, hosts must live where the parties are being hosted and maintain a guest list.  Crowd Management training is necessary for hosts of parties with 50 or more students.

Adams pointed out that the College is the only higher education institution in Vermont that allows students to host registered parties on campus, as all other campuses are officially dry.
Adams expressed a desire to make the party registration system more accessible to students, and explained that he was currently working on this with Residential Programs Coordinator Lee Zerrilla.  Adams also mentioned that they were examining the possibility of an online party registration system.

Dean Collado expressed an interest in centralizing the party registration process, which is currently spread across the Center for Campus Activities and Leadership (CCAL), Event Management and Public Safety.

The Council’s upcoming agenda includes discussion of a campaign to address the problem of disappearing dishes from the dining halls, College hazing policy, sexual harassment policy and gender-neutral housing.