Housing restructures FE, cuts PAs

This week, the Department of Housing announced a major restructuring of Freshman Experience (FE).

All 20 peer advisor positions as well as the six staff advisor positions now assigned to cover FE, traditional and suite-style dorms will be eliminated. The changes were announced to Housing’s student staff at a meeting Monday night.

A new position, hall director, will be created to replace the peer and staff advisors. Hall directors will be full-time employees, not students. Eight hall directors will supervise the activities of peer leaders in the FE dorms.

The restructuring also replaces four existing residence life coordinators with three area managers. Hall directors will report to these area managers.

The reorganization creates a new Assistant Director for Student and Community Development position and four graduate assistant positions. All changes are planned to take effect by July 1, 2004.

Under the current structure, peer leaders (PLs) help entering freshmen move in and understand housing rules. Peer advisers (PAs) in turn supervise PLs and help them adjust to their responsibilities. In suite-style dorms, community advisers (CAs) do the same job as the PLs, with staff advisers (SAs) supervising several CAs.

Dan Morrison, Associate Director of Residence Life, explained the reasoning behind the changes.

“The FE program has been around for 12 years. We had 400 students at its inception, and now it has grown to about 1900 students. The program was very well regarded, but its structure needs to change to accommodate the increase in size [of the FE population],” Morrison said.

In spring 2002, Rosalind Meyers, Associate Vice President of Auxiliary Services, initiated a review of FE. Three committees were formed to conduct independent reviews. One committee included faculty and staff members. The second was composed of Housing student staff members and student leaders. Outside consultants made up the third committee. The committees’ findings were reported in the Executive Summary of the Comprehensive Review and Enhancement Initiatives of the Freshman Experience Program.

“We had very similar findings and recommendations from all three committees,” Morrison said. “Keep the PL-to-resident ratio at 1:16, better supervise the PLs and improve training for staff.”

The committees also found that “student staff had become bogged down in excess paperwork and overburdened with disciplinary responsibilities for which they are not prepared,” according to the summary.

Morrison sees advantages with replacing student PAs with full time staff members.

“PLs will have access to staff devoted to this job. In the current system, PAs are students with their own design projects, homeworks and tests to worry about. This helps place the focus back on making the most out of the FE experience,” Morrison said. “PLs now get full-time supervision, and the affected staff will be able to move into CA, PL or SA positions.”

Some Housing student staff members disagree. They say PLs would be more comfortable speaking to supervisors if those supervisors were students as well.

“The hardest part of a PLs job is in the first three weeks, adjusting to move-in and the new responsibilities,” said Joe Dant, a second year PL.

“Peer advisers served as mentors to peer leaders...A peer leader is not going to want to bug a Hall Director at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, whereas they could have talked to a PA,” said one SA who did not want to be identified.

“Inexperienced PLs will lose the benefit of communication with someone who is always there for them [on the floor],” PA Tanner Holloway said.

Morrison said he expects resistance to the changes.

“I realize some folks will be upset by the elimination of peer advisor positions,” he said.

However, entering freshmen will not notice the changes because freshmen have direct contact with PLs, not PAs, Morrison said.

“From the student’s perspective, this is going to be a positive change,” the SA said.

Morrison points to other benefits of having full-time professionals instead of part-time student PAs.

“Since each PA gets a single room, this means that there will be 40 additional rooms for incoming freshmen,” Morrison said.

Morrison also pointed to rushed PL training program as an area that will improve under the new structure.

“In the quarter system, students took a class, for credit, which trained them for the job,” he said. “Now we have to make [PLs] come back [from break] early and train them in a short time,” he said.

The skills and experiences required to be an effective PL will be taught in a new class.

"[The Housing department] is going to ask PLs to take a course lasting 12 weeks. No plans have been made to give students academic credits for the class,” PL Sushant Anand said.

Some student employees worry that the changes may take a toll on PL recruitment and retention efforts.

“Peer leaders have almost no incentive to stick around-no upward movement available to them. They can only move laterally and become CAs,” the SA said.

Other PAs and PLs echo the same sentiment.

“We don’t have a goal anymore, nothing that we feel that we can aspire to. The PL position is pretty much a dead end,” Dant said.

Several PLs also complain about the lack of student impute.

“They could have talked more with current staff, PLs, PAs,” Holloway said.

Current PL Brenda Batovsky felt left out of the decision-making process.

“I wish they would have gotten more student input,” Batovsky said.