The end of the school year is approaching. Students are just arriving on campus from a wonderful break. They continue with their daily school lives, but something has changed. The cafeteria workers are not letting students into the dining hall with their student I.D. cards. Students have to go and get a stamp on their I.D. verifying that they are on the meal plan in order to eat in the cafeteria.
Now this may not seem like a big deal, but it is nearly the end of the school year. The university is starting to enforce the policy of actually checking whether students are on the meal plan when there are a few weeks left.
I asked one worker, “Why are you enforcing this now?” She replied, “It’s not fair for the ones who actually have a meal plan to be paying for it and others who don’t to just eat for free.”
While, yes, I do understand and agree with this I still feel as if this policy should have been enforced long ago, in the beginning of the semester, and not shortly before the end. Students were caught off guard by this. One minute they can just come in the café by showing their regular I.D. then the next they aren’t allowed in the café without a stamped I.D.
I talked to a few students and their answers were all the same. They don’t feel they’re being treated fairly. People with no meal plan have been eating for free for two semesters and now they want to enforce the no meal plan, no eat policy and the end of second semester, when students have a lot of other concerns on their minds.
They already make students who live on campus buy a meal plan so the least they can do is make sure only the people who are paying for it can eat in the cafe. If they are going to have this policy, it should be strictly enforced. The university should have been more organized in the way it was enforced and they need to be on top of this when the next semester starts.
— Breana Gambrell
