SYLVANA CUBILLOS
Special to The Leader
The frustration among Fredonia students about the food availability on campus seemed to reach a new level these past couple of weeks when flyers started appearing around campus with a QR code and the title, “Dear FSA, we have had enough.”
If you scanned the QR code, you were redirected to a change.org petition urging to “Change the SUNY Fredonia Meal Plans.”
The petition essentially has three main requests: more meal swipes, longer hours of operation for existing dining halls and more dining hall options than the ones that are currently available.
The petition was started by Isabelle Price, a freshman biochemistry major from Rochester, N.Y. After having some issues last semester with the dining options herself, Price decided to create the petition to address some of her and other students’ concerns.
One central focus of the petition is the number of meals offered per week. Meal Plan #1, which is the meal plan that first semester students are required to have, costs $3,115. The plan gives students 19 meals per week and a total of 425 points per semester.
Price shared her own experience about how having 19 meals per week is impacting her. Price is a member of Fredonia’s women’s swim team.
“As an athlete, I am constantly burning more calories and eating more food,” Price said. “I was finding myself running out of meals by Thursday or Wednesday every week, and I was super hungry.”
However, Darin Schulz, executive director of the Faculty Student Association (FSA), explained that the 19 meals per week was not an arbitrarily decided number.
“The number of meals was set at 19 so that a student could eat at every single meal period offered during the week at Cranston,” Schulz said. “There are three meal periods per day [Monday through Friday] and just two Saturday and Sunday [at Cranston].”
In addition to the meals, Schulz said the “425 points that the plan offers were intended to supplement the allowance of meals that may have been used by a student at Willy C’s or Starbucks along with the opportunity to use [points] in the [Convenience Store].”
In regards to the request for unlimited meals that was mentioned in the petition, Schulz said how this was not feasible since it would then “constrain [FSA’s] ability to allow meal allowances in locations such as [Willy C’s and Starbucks].”
The petition also requested more dining hall options as Price believes that the ones that are offered “are not meeting the dietary needs of students on campus.”
For Schulz, the biggest problem that FSA is facing is the constraint of revenue due to factors such as lower enrollment at SUNY Fredonia during the last couple of years.
“We want to do more things for the campus, but we have to live by the budget,” Schulz said. “The budget does not currently allow for opening more locations.”
The last request that Price mentioned in the petition was student concerns over dining hours. As the main dining hall on campus, Price believes that Cranston should be open until at least 8 p.m. instead of 7:30 a.m to 7:30 p.m, as it currently works on weekdays.
“They can’t keep closing at 7:25 because [some] classes don’t end until [late] sometimes and practices don’t end until certain times and then students are left with only one option, which is Willy C’s,” Price said. “There needs to be a longer hours period.”
About the hours of operation, Schulz justified them by saying that “keeping Cranston open would bring a lot of extra costs to keep it open for more hours.”
Regarding possible next steps, Price said, “I don’t know where [Schulz] will want to direct this conversation. … As the director, he will probably want this to go a certain way, which I completely understand.”
She also expressed how she is willing to take her concerns as high as she needs to with the administration. She is interested in possibly sitting on the FSA’s board of directors as a student board member in the future.
As for Schulz, in regards to the petition, he said “I think no matter [what you do] there are always going to be people that are concerned about how the service is delivered. I think no matter where you go, there’s always going to be [those that] the system doesn’t work perfectly for.”