The NIC administration and employees of the Student Union Building (SUB) Market have been working together to improve and make up for the bad rap they developed in the 2018 fall semester, due to the SUB-par dining services provided as they struggled to make ends meet while dealing with some last minute, unforeseen complications.
“This year was like a perfect storm.” Paula Czirr, the manager of residence life at NIC, said about the SUB food service for the fall semester. “Nothing was working, the timing was off. We all just kind of were victims of it.”
For the past few years, NIC has been looking into contracting out their food services to a company that is well versed in providing food to large sums of people. The school even began negotiating with a company called Sodexo about taking over the SUB Market for the fall semester; however, in the beginning of August, they decided to continue the food services as a self-operation with only their existing staff.
Things began to fall apart when Eddie Nelson, the dining services director, resigned with just a few weeks left before the fall semester started.
“We were in a panic” Greydon Stanley, the Vice President of student services, said.
In response, the school decided, at the last minute, to go ahead with the contract with Sodexo, but this gave everyone involved very little time to prepare for the start of the semester, and thus lead to some difficulties.
Stanley said that the contract with Sodexo was not finalized until November, so they really had to limp their way through the fall and try as best they could to compensate for what was lacking at the SUB.
The Residence Hall offered free Thanksgiving and Christmas meals for students, as well as, doing their best to ramp up the C-Store in the Residence Hall by adding more menu items and expanding its hours.
“The C-Store numbers were off the charts,” Czirr said. While money spent at the SUB Market was down almost 19%, the C-Store went up by nearly 40% in the fall semester.
Czirr said she has been more than pleased with the efforts made by her team at the Residence Hall to upgrade the C-Store, especially those of Tayler Coats, the senior resident associate, who Czirr said has really taken charge in implementing these changes and has even more plans to improve the store this spring.
Along with all of these strides made by the administration and the Residence Hall staff, the school ended up breaking their ‘use it or lose it’ meal plan policy and refunded the money leftover on students’ Cardinal Cards, as well as giving back a percentage of what they originally paid for their meal plans, adding up to almost $80,000 that the school gave back to students who had meal plans.
Stanley and Czirr said that they were concerned about the number of students that would not want to come back for the spring semester because of the issues with the dining services in the fall, but they both expressed their optimism coming into this semester, and said that they had already received lots of compliments on the improvements made at the SUB Market.
“We feel like we’ve already gotten so much better, and it’s only going to get better,” Stanley said.
The SUB Market has expanded its menu to offer more meal options, as well as altered its hours to be more predictable and convenient for the student customers.
“It was really hard to ride out the terrible part,” Czirr said. “I think this semester and next semester are going to get so much better and hopefully we can all just forget about the fall.”
