Photo courtesy of the author / resized from original
By Brittanyana Pierro
Several students working as Residential Advisors (RAs) for on-campus housing have recently quit their jobs due to lack of adequate pay, a concern for food security and issues of transparent communication with Residential and Dining Services (RAD) professional staff.
On Oct. 22, just three weeks after the start of the 2019-20 academic school year, student RAs collectively presented a three-page-long list of needs and demands to the professional staff at RAD, including Director Sharon Goodman.
The introduction of the letter reads:
“We, the RAs, are struggling to survive and thrive under our current circumstances, job responsibilities, and methods of compensation. We are coming to you with three major areas that we need to see improvement in, in order to adequately perform our jobs and exist fruitfully as students and human beings. In each area, we have elaborated on specific needs and given options for what we feel is an acceptable way to address them. With each need, we have provided a date at which we expect the action to be completed and/or a plan communicated directly to the RA staff. We ask that you listen with an open mind, and recognize that we are taking this time to advocate for our own wellbeing in the ways that you have taught us to.”
The three major areas of concern mentioned in the body of the letter were “Transparency and Clear Communication,” “Food Security,” and “More Adequate Compensation.” The weekly salary for a student RA at Evergreen is approximately $60 per week, averaging out to $240 per month, with a slight variation depending on your leadership role. This weekly stipend is contracted out with a required work week of 20 hours, although many former RAs testified to working much more than their allotted timesheets. “We live at our job,” said Aurora Oceguera, a former RA for C Building, “If a resident comes and knocks on your door and has an emergency [after hours], you’re not going to tell them no.”
Ocegeura along with three of her ex-co workers Enid Tevebaugh, Levi Waniorek, and Hunter Herman, spoke with the Cooper Point Journal about the many long term and day-to-day discrepancies faced by Evergreen RAs that ultimately led each of them to quit their positions by the end of fall term. Throughout the duration of the quarter, five of the 17 RAs quit their positions, and two others were removed, leaving only 10 of the original staff members after just three months.
Major issues regarding nutritional access arose among RAs this year due to a significant cut in the students’ contract-allotted meal plans. Whereas, in the 2018-2019 school year and prior, RAs were given a choice between the Gold and Silver meal plans, RAs this year are now only given an allowance of 10 meals per week to be used in the on-campus dining cafeteria, the Greenery.
In their list of needs and demands, students claimed that this allotment was not sufficient, stating that “Multiple members of the staff have gone hungry on the weekends because the amount of meals we have been provided does not allow us to eat as many times as we need to every day in order to maintain our health.”
“You get 10 meals a week in the Greenery, let’s just say you’re supposed to eat three meals a day, seven days a week, that’s 21 meals. We didn’t get even half that,” said Enid Tevebaugh, a former RA.
In addition to the 10 meals a week, the student workers are allocated $80 per quarter in Dining Bucks, a digital form of currency that can be bought through Evergreen’s website and used at the accepting on-campus restaurants and stores. “If you don’t have savings, or if you don’t have any extra income from say like parents or scholarships, you have to rely on your Dining Bucks or rely on other resources like the food bank,” said Tevebaugh.
Many RAs are being forced to find meals from outside sources like the Thurston County Food Bank, or apply for governmental assistance. RAs who cannot eat in the Greenery due to dietary or schedule restrictions fare even harder, as food bank resources are often limited to what is available and not necessarily what students need nutritionally.
RAD professional staff has been made aware of their employees’ issues of food security over the last few years, and have formally recommended students to apply for government assistance like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) to meet their dietary needs. Unfortunately, according to the USDA website itself, “ … most able-bodied students ages 18 through 49 who are enrolled in college or other institutions of higher education at least half [of the] time are not eligible for SNAP benefits.”
The former RAs claimed that this year RAD Pro staff made changes to the students’ contracts raising the number of hours required by each worker to exactly 20 hours a week so that low-income students could meet one of the several requirements in order to apply for SNAP benefits.
Lack of adequate monetary compensation for Residential Advisors is quite a common occurrence in the policy makeup of college campuses and especially among Washington’s state schools. RAs at Eastern Washington State University and Washington State University do not receive a monthly stipend at all. However, according to both schools’ websites, the student workers do receive full room and board, a full meal plan in their campus’ cafeteria, and have opportunities for extra compensation during holidays.
Dissatisfaction among college RAs is not a new phenomenon, and it seems especially prevalent among liberal arts institutions. In 2017, RAs at Scripps College in Claremont, California, collectively went on strike after one of their fellow RAs committed suicide; likely due in part to the stress of her job. The demands of the strike included “ … extensive changes to financial aid, increased mental health resources and a restructuring of the RA role,” according to an article in the Claremont Courier. In their list of demands, Scripps College students went on to state that “RAs are asked to police our peers with a system that does not actually model restorative justice … We are expected to implement a justice system that affects marginalized students more than students with money and privilege.”
