Have Your Voice Heard at SGA Town Hall
By Annie Renz
Stonehill's Student Government Association is opening its doors for the student body in a "Town Hall" fashion, giving students the chance to raise questions and concerns towards campus leadership.
SGA meets weekly as an organization, but they're turning a couple of Monday meetings each semester into what they're calling a "Town Hall." At these designated meetings, SGA brings guest speakers from different departments around campus to speak to the SGA and student body.
Executive President Nick Bazirgan '28 said bringing in guest speakers has become a priority for this year's SGA executive board.
"I think, in particular, when we're bringing in campus leadership and administrators, we want to make it a priority that students are aware of what's going on," said Bazirgan.
SGA invited Tamara Anderson, Chief Information Officer in the Information Technology department, Jeremy Weaver, the general manager of Bon Appetit, Mark Sabina, Stonehill's Director of Business Support Services, and Christian Hughes, the Assistant Director of Residence Life to speak at this year's inaugural Town Hall on Oct. 5.
"I think it's a great opportunity to hear directly from campus leadership. It doesn't go down the grapevine; it's directly from people who are executing these things on a daily basis. It's also an opportunity to ask questions and engage directly with them," said Bazirgan.
The guest speakers created a presentation for the Town Hall that focused on the new systems that have been installed around campus since the school year began. Conversation began with the replacement of physical hill cards with digital IDs and how that has influenced dining and door access.
According to Anderson, the old system needed to be replaced because it was more than 20 years old.
"It all reached end of life, which with technology basically means they're not supported, which brings a lot of risk into the College. For these systems, huge projects, it was important that we did it, it was not an option," said Anderson.
Stonehill turned to Atrium, a vendor that was used to digitalize students' wallets and manage dining dollars and meal swipes. Anderson said the College chose Atrium because it has very tight integration with the other systems on campus, including dining operations and point-of-sales (POS) operations.
The Verkada App is another major system that has now become routine for students on campus for getting into buildings and through both entrance gates.
"One of the reasons why we chose Verkada is that we have a long history; we basically have a five-year history with them," said Anderson.
She said the College's security cameras already come from Verkada, so the school felt strongly about moving forward with the company for other security measures around campus.
The guest speakers also talked about the dining POS shutdown on Sept. 18 that the Summit covered. On that day, which spanned into a long weekend of trouble, POS devices were put in offline mode at retail locations around campus, basically everything except Commons.
New details came from the meeting that the Summit did not originally report on. Anderson said at the time of the shutdown, Stonehill's management didn't have the access to be able to recover the problems. It was Verkada's management that was working to solve the issues.
Since the shutdown, the College has made changes to how the server is managed so that Stonehill can fix a shutdown if it happens again.
"We are working to make sure it doesn't happen again. We don't expect to have a shutdown like that ever again, but if we do, we will be able to recover it ourselves," said Anderson.
Mark Sabina, director of business services, said if the POS system goes down again, they will switch to a manual system at retail locations. He said they've learned it is more efficient and will shorten the lines faster than trying to work through the drastically slow offline mode at POS registers.
Sabina also said he's received concerns regarding students not having a working phone on their person when going to a dining location on campus and not being able to get a meal.
"If somebody is in that situation, they can always go to the Commons and provide us with their hill ID number," said Sabina.
Weaver hopped on the microphone and said students who don't remember their hill ID number have another alternative option if they find themselves in this situation.
"We will just take your first and last name, and we'll process it accordingly," said Weaver.
A dining slowdown that persists on campus is when students want to use two meal swipes at Gigi's or Lux. It takes a couple minutes between swipes for the system to reload.
"It will take some time for that to reset, I believe it's a five-minute wait on that. So, we are now usually stacking those two meals together to run, and it's been working fine on that side. We are basically learning this as we go through it. We appreciate everyone's patience as we move through this process," said Weaver.
Anderson pivoted to Verkada campus access, saying the IT department is working closely with residence life and campus police to oversee the transition to Verkada's Bluetooth accessibility structure.
"We are seeing a little bit of a slowdown at [138 entrance] gate, occasionally not regularly, but we do have our account representative and engineering department coming in and we'll be working with them on that issue," said Anderson.
Christian Hughes, an assistant director for residence life, said the majority of the difficulties he's seen with the new Verkada app came at the start of the semester.
Hughes said the first-year students had greater success because they didn't know anything different. He said returning students may have missed some of the communications over the summer and came to campus thinking they could still use their physical hill card to get through the main gate.
"I think some other issues that we continue to hear and work with students on a case-by-case basis are when they go to their residence hall, [the Verkada app] is inconsistent when it scans. Sometimes it scans from far away, sometimes you have to get right up to it, and that's something that we're still working with IT to figure out if there are ways to make adjustments to make that experience easier," said Hughes.
He said if students do encounter similar issues to contact residence life.
The other main issue that residence life is seeing is when students' phones die or break and they can't get into their dorm.
"If that happens, come over to Residence Life's office and we can provide temporary access cards so you can get into your room. Outside of hours, we have campus police helping assist students to get in," said Hughes.
If you don't have access to a charged phone to call campus police, Hughes said the next best step is to walk over to campus police.
The floor eventually opened to questions from SGA members and the audience. Students asked questions about personal encounters they've had with dining and dorm access, while others asked about protocol for power outages around campus and changes to weekend dining hours.
Executive President Bazirgan said if you have questions for campus leadership, there might be two more opportunities to do so for the remainder of the semester.
The next open meeting is the State of the Hill on Monday, Oct. 26. Bazirgan said he hopes to hold another Town Hall in November.
Aurora Ferreira, executive programming chair, said a livestream of this meeting has been posted to the SGA instagram, @sga_stonehill. She said she hopes the Town Hall meetings will engage the student population more and bring in more student involvement.
Bazirgan said students can contact him if they'd like to hear from certain leadership speakers at these meetings.
"These happen when we see issues on campus, but if there's issues that students feel pertinent and want to have someone to come in for, we're happy to do that too," said Bazirgan.
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