To help ease the stress of staff members working overtime to help MU students, the Missouri Students Association recently made the decision to recommend an increase in student fees.
MSA Secretary of Auxiliaries Matt Sheppard said the fee increase would be used to staff professional workers within KCOU/88.1 and MUTV, as well as other MSA auxiliaries.
“The increase is being proposed to add additional professional staff to several MSA Auxiliaries,” Sheppard said. “Over the last several years MSA services and programming has grown at an astonishing rate, but our staffing needs have not. Student involvement has grown at an astonishing rate, but staffing has not increased at all. We have some staff members averaging 80-plus hours a week just to keep up with the workload.”
Each year the Student Fee Review Committee makes recommendations on increases and decreases in student fees. After formally introducing the recommendations the MSA Senate must vote to approve the recommendations, according to Bill 50-XX which was passed last January.
“MSA has not asked for an increase in several years,” Sheppard said. “In fact, I remember when I was a freshman they actually cut the fee by 5 percent. So in a way, we are just undoing that reduction that was made. Without this fee increase, MSA could see cuts in services and programming. We aren’t going to continue to allow the awesome staff that we have to continue working these demanding workloads which will cause them to burn out. When they burn out we risk losing them.”
Sheppard said the increase will help the entire student body, and the fee increase per student is not significant and would cost an additional 75 cents to $1.
“(The increase) won’t just have an impact on MSA,” Sheppard said. “The increase will positively impact the entire campus. In MSA, it will allow our staff to cut down on their current workload, increase services and programming, and also allow our departments that are capable of generating revenue generate more revenue to give back to the students.”
Sheppard said there has been no resistance from students and faculty regarding the increase.
“Everyone is very much in support of it,” Sheppard said. “Any resistance that would happen is when someone hears the word increase and freaks out. The thing to keep in mind is that this is a very small increase that is going to have a huge impact felt on this campus for a long time.”
MSA President Eric Woods said the increase would also help to fund a part-time lawyer to aid the current full-time lawyer on campus.
“The bottom line is that we have these services and the demand for them is expanding,” Woods said. “We just need a little bit of extra money to continue to support those auxiliaries. MSA has not asked for an increase in many, many years, and we haven’t even asked for inflation. For us to attempt to continue and operate with increased enrollment and a need for expanding services on the current budget is not doable.”
The fee increase is still in the proposal stages and has yet to be passed by the MSA Senate.
“We have some of the best professional staff working for MSA and it’s important to make it clear that we want to do everything we can to keep them and continue the awesome growth the organization has seen,” Sheppard said.
