ETSU students have an opportunity to voice their concerns about on-campus issues by attending the Residence Hall Association’s Social Issues Committee meeting.
The committee first looks at the concerns of on-campus residents, but any student can attending the meetings on Monday nights at 9 in Meeting Room 6 in the Culp Center.
The committee made up of RHA members will take student’s issues and bring them before the proper authorities. Issues can be any concern about campus, such as public safety, housing or OIT.
“Students can expect to find people who listen and care and who will try to come up with ways to solve problems,” said Patrick Fessenbecker, committee chair and RHA president.
Fessenbecker said attendance usually correlates with major problems on campus. “There was lots of attendance after the power outage and when the Internet was down.”
The two biggest complaints the committee is addressing are technology problems in the residence halls and faulty emergency telephones.
“The Internet connection in the residence halls is sporadic, slow and sometimes doesn’t work at all,” Fessenbecker said. “The support service isn’t very good and it’s sometimes 45 to 72 hours before anything is done about [a problem].”
“There needs to be a continuous exchange of information between students and OIT, and the committee can bring that communication. Overall, we want a good working relationship between students and the Office of Information Technology,” he said.
The committee is working with Public Safety on testing the campus emergency phones.
“One of our members contacted Public Safety and found out there is no regular testing of the emergency phones,” Fessen-becker said. “What we are doing now is trying to schedule a time to test each phone. We’ll have to let Public Safety know, so that they’ll know not to dispatch officers.”
The Social Issues Committee has been a standing committee of RHA and was created to help students get their concerns known and then solved.
“It was a consensus among students that there was no forum to address problems and there was no available way to say, ‘Hey, we have a problem, how can we fix it?'” Fessenbecker said. “Now they can bring them before the committee.”
One goal the committee has achieved is creating software guidelines for students coming to ETSU. “Some students come only prepared with Microsoft Works and if they don’t have Word or Powerpoint, they could run into some trouble,” Fessenbecker said.
He added that the committee wanted to make life easier on incoming students and ETSU’s technical support staff.
If the students and support staff are using the same programs, the support staff will be able to provide greater help when students encounter difficulties.
The guidelines have yet to be published and distributed.

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