A resident assistant (pictured above) conducts a staff meeting. Student life has introduced several new policies this year and there may be a new addition with a change to the snow day policy (Udeshi Seneviratne/ Photo Editor).
Student Life is considering implementing a policy that would result in Resident Assistants having 24-hour duty shifts on snow days. RAs would also be required to have activities set up for students to participate in.
Director of Student Life Chip Matthews stated that the main goal of this change in policy would be to ensure student safety.
“The idea of having people on rounds means that there are people available to help out, especially if it’s inclement weather ... if we were to cancel classes because of high winds, having people walk through the building to be able to be aware of what’s going on, it would be a wise thing to do,” Matthews said. “The activities piece is because we’re a residential campus, so people should be able to have things to do on a snow day. So, I just think it’s one of those things where it’s an opportunity for us to be able to continue to stay true to our mission, which is, to provide a safe, engaging environment.”
He went on to say that the activities RAs would plan could be as simple as cards and board games; the goal is simply to create activities so students have something to occupy their time. He also emphasized that this is considered an emergency procedure and would rarely happen.
A problem with this proposed policy brought up by students was that sometimes the school doesn’t cancel classes until halfway through the day or the morning of classes. It is unclear what would constitute a snow day in the circumstance that some classes were attended by students during the day.
“Half the time when they announce snow days, they don’t even do it until halfway through the day when the classes are canceled. So what are you going to do? Go to class, come back [and then want to be on duty?]. Yeah, no,” former RA senior Joshua Espinosa said. “Overall, I just think that [for] residents in general, [Student Life is] kind of undervaluing their own self-sufficiency. I think that they know how to take care of themselves.”
RAs are concerned and feel as though this is being sprung on them with little warning and with thought of how it will affect their already packed schedules. Former RA Catherine Brownell ‘18 explained that if she were still an RA, she would not want more put on her plate during what most students perceive as a day off.
“The way I felt when I was an RA was that there was always sort of these new expectations,” Brownell said. “I certainly hope that surrounding the school snow day policy, there’s more discussion involving RAs because how I tended to feel a lot was that new policies would all of a sudden be put in place and we would be expected to follow them, but without being part of the discussion.”
RAs have listed several times in which they felt new policies were added without warning or input from the RAs themselves. One example was the intentional conversations that began last semester.
The intentional conversations policy requires RAs to have conversations with almost all of their residents which they then must enter into a spreadsheet system, using hashtags to identify key themes in the conversation, according to Brownell
“If you were to have a conversation with [an RA] and they were to say, ‘here’s where I’m struggling,’ you would pick that topic and then we’d be able to say, ‘well this month we had this many hits on this topic,’” Matthews said. “So we need to be looking at what can we do to support [them] ... the whole idea behind it is to keep it confidential. It’s not recording information on specific people.”
Even though the information that is released from intentional conversations is confidential, Espinosa said he thought that reporting names connected to the conversations was “pretty invasive of someone’s privacy.” Espinosa explained that students can and should be able to take care of themselves at this point, thus there’s no need to have executive Student Life workers watching over them, especially when it invades their privacy.
Brownell explained that intentional conversations made it harder to have natural discussions with residents because conversations have to be planned.
“When it’s casual, it can be hard to remember to follow up with filling in the spreadsheets. I think that’s where some RAs feel it’s unnatural because when we talk to someone. If I did go back and fill out the spreadsheet, I was planning that conversation rather than having it happen naturally,” Brownell said. “Recording [the conversations] often makes it harder to have more natural conversations.”