The Student Services Finance Committee passed budgets for WSUM Student Radio and the Greater University Tutoring Services at the last meeting of the semester Monday night.
SSFC passed WSUM’s $391,387.40 budget for the fiscal year 2020 in a vote of 7-0-5.
Many of the members including, Chair Jeremy Swanson and Vice Chair Zaakir Abdul-Wahid, said the budget and presentation was well put together.
The Greater University Tutoring Services also presented their budget for the 2020 fiscal year. The committee voted to pass their budget proposal of $203,920 immediately after the presentation in a vote of 11-0-1.
GUTS offers tutoring to University of Wisconsin students and university affiliates for specific classes, language practice and general studying tips. The organization is currently transitioning out of funding from the General Student Services Fund, which has allowed them to expand.
SSFC approves MSA, Student Judiciary budgets, hears WSUM budget proposal
GUTS co-director Nancy Herrera said their efforts to expand has increased demand and overall needs of services.
“We’ve been trying to expand our programming, expand our outreach and also expand our campus partners,” Herrera said. “All of these together have increased demand.”
According to Herrera, GUTS is one of the largest and most accessible support units on campus. To increase outreach, GUTS’ budget request reflects the need to create a new coordinator of academic support services position.
Claire Barrett, GUTS assistant director of academic engagement, said this position was partly created to help assess learning services across campus by identifying gaps in programming that GUTS or other units on campus can fill.
According to Vivian Burnette, who is currently piloting the academic support services coordinator position, her main role is dedicated to supervising. She also advises the co-directors about staffing issues and discusses outreach opportunities with them.
“We all do a little bit of outreach but it’s nice to kind of think about it as broadening outreach,” Burnette said.
While GUTS student staff are able to do on-the-ground outreach, Burnette said she works on a broader level by connecting with different programs across campus. According to Burnette, this was not able to be done by just the GUTS co-directors and part-time student staff.
Herrera added that they have already noticed great benefits to the position despite the fact that it was just started this semester. She said benefits for the GUTS staff ultimately trickle down to the students they serve too.
After voting to pass the GUTS budget, Abdul-Wahid concluded the last SSFC meeting of the semester by saying that in the four years he has been on the committee, this group has done the most succinct job in executing SSFC operations.
The next SSFC meeting will be Jan. 28 at the start of the spring semester.
