By: Noah Nunez
General Repoter
Throughout September into early October, student workers in multiple positions were unpaid due to a Connecticut State Colleges and Universities investigation regarding whether stipend-paid positions complied with labor laws.
The issue that derived from this investigation, as Tracy Tyree, vice president of student affairs, describes was more tech-based, preventing payroll from being able to input stipends during the progression of this issue.
“We learned this summer that there was going to be a review of that, and as we got to the beginning of the semester, that had not gotten resolved that some of the positions no longer had ways to pay the students,” Tyree said.
The main roles affected by this investigation were Student Government leadership, Programs Council leadership and Peer Mentors.
However, student affairs sent up a request for stipends to be kept for other positions.
“We put together a document requisition exceptions for student media, the ones I just named and orientation leaders,” Tyree said.
At this point, the issue has been resolved, with stipend-paid positions being returned to their original format, but the investigation is still ongoing, with the university being ready to change its process if the CSCU requests it.
However, the actual payment of the student workers was only part of the problem. A major aspect of this issue was the lack of communication regarding what was happening, namely, to Interim President Sandra Bulmer.
President Bulmer was informed about the issue via students on Oct. 1 during a visit by Interim Chancellor Natalie Braswell; she was shocked that the news had not reached her sooner.
“How unfortunate this is an issue that you have to deal with right at the beginning of the semester. I’m really sorry,” Bulmer said. “This could have come to our office sooner, and I wish it had.”
Tyree’s reasoning for letting the issue go undiscussed for all of September was that it was a more institutional issue that did notrequire higher management involvement.
“It’s something that people that are in the department needed to fix. When it came to light, it was a big problem in how it affected students, but it wasn’t a big problem in terms of level of authority that was involved in fixing it,” Tyree said.
Following the president’s discovery of the issue, meetings were scheduled with the three major groups affected on the second and fifth of October to discuss what had occurred and why students had not been paid.
However, before these meetings, students, like speech, language and hearing sciences major, Jolie Jasmin, a junior and Programs Council member and Peer Mentor, were left in the dark about the payment issues and what a potential hourly payment looked like.
“Our jobs cannot be facilitated hourly; we facilitate the student experience. You can’t put on the clock me hanging out in the classroom with the freshmen; you can’t time me planning a trip,” Jasmin said.
Given the time in which this problem was known from the end of August to its solution in the middle of October, students and even higher-ranking faculty were left out of an explanation regarding why students have not been paid.
