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BY RACHEL SCOTT

In print | March 24, 2005

Environmental services, Dining services and Facilities staff have developed new guidelines for staff involved in the Learning for Life program because of concerns about fair distribution of work and equal opportunity to participate in the program.

Learning for Life is a tutoring program that places staff members and students in partnerships in order to work together on a skill or activity. Partnerships have focused on computer instruction, Web site design, exercise and Bible studies, among other activities. Staff are allowed to devote up to three paid hours per week to participating in the program.

According to Environmental services supervisor Don Bankston, the guidelines were developed in part to combat perceived abuses of the system that arose because of varying time shifts for employees. This variety made it harder to keep track of when people were using work hours to participate in the program.

The new guidelines stipulate that employees who miss over eight hours of work in one week due to vacation or illness may not participate in Learning for Life that week unless it is outside their regular work hours.

Another guideline states that “an employee who has reached the state of Written Notice for performance is excluded from participating until the performance issues are resolved.”

The guidelines also limit the total number of employees participating in Learning for Life to one-third of each department and call for a lottery process if more than that number is interested in participating.

According to Associate Vice President for Facilities Management Stuart Hain, the guidelines were initiated in part out of a concern for distributing work fairly.

“It’s an issue of equity,” he said. “We give a good deal of relief time so that staff can participate in Learning for Life, and others have to cover that time. In order to be fair, we had to make sure we didn’t have people sharing too big a burden.”

Hain said another concern was ensuring that staff had an equal chance to participate in Learning for Life.

Bankston, who is one of the staff coordinators of the program and has been part of a partnership for several years, sees the changes more in terms of staff accountability. Since it was started in 1998, Learning for Life has been largely run by the students and staff involved, but the new guidelines will give supervisors a greater role in overseeing staff participation.

Bankston said the program ran smoothly when all environmental services staff worked 6 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., “but when the shifts started splitting up [about two years ago], we kind of lost track of who was doing what. We never actually had guidelines, so different supervisors were handling Learning for Life in their own areas as they saw fit by the amount of work they had, and we had some abusers,” he said. “With changing times, they decided to basically write these guidelines for all the supervisors to be on the same page.”

According to student coordinator Lillian Ray ‘05, although the development of the guidelines originated within the facilities, environmental services and dining services departments, the student and staff coordinators also had a role in shaping and reviewing them. “We had a meeting with the whole steering committee and all the environmental service supervisors and came up with [the current guidelines],” she said. "There were some guidelines where we said ’we’re going to need to talk about the wording or talk about making this a little more flexible,’ and they were really receptive."

Bankston said he does not expect the new guidelines to greatly affect the workings of the program.

“We’re pretty well within all of them,” he said.

However, Myra Vallianos ‘05, Bankston’s partner in the program, expressed some reservations that the lottery system might cause participants to feel pressured by the limited amount of time.

“My fear with all the changes is that it’s just going to become this formal technical thing - like ‘I have one semester to do this’ - and that’s the last thing that we want,” she said.

“My hope with these guidelines is that they won’t impact any of the good stuff with the program, and they’ll help us keep the communication a little more open with the supervisors,” Ray said

Bankston emphasized the personal value he has gotten from relationships formed with students in his past and current partnerships.

“I owe a lot to Learning for Life,” he said. “Whatever guidelines they throw at us, we’ll do whatever we need to do to keep Learning for Life going.”

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