Angel Dominguez
Assignment Editor
This semester Dominican’s Dining Services started enforcing a long-ignored rule against resident students sharing food from their meal plans with other students, but back-tracked on the change when students began to show frustration.
Resident students must buy a meal plan that includes several set meals each week and more flexible Meal Plan Dollars/Points. The set meals expire at the end of each week. Commuters have the option of buying other meal plans.
Many resident students had been in the habit of “swiping” and buying extra meals for friends who didn’t have the resident meal plans.
Debra Kash, director of auxiliary services, appreciates the community feeling at Dominican between staff and students, but also anticipates working with the staff in both the Cyber Café and Dining Hall to ensure they begin to enforce the policies that have been put in place for the meal plan program.
Kash states that the dining services policies were reevaluated with the department at the end of the last semester and their push was to enforce it this semester.
Many students complained, many to the student government, said Matt Galdi, vice president of Dominican’s Student Government Association (SGA).
“At first, we heard students talking about it, and then at our Jan. 30 SGA meeting, they were pretty upset about the meal exchange and not being able to swipe for others,” Galdi said.
Resident Kyla Pride was one of the unhappy students.
“It’s our DU money and we’ve already paid for it, so if we want to swipe for someone else then we should be able to,” Pride said.
Hannah Disilverio likes to share a meal with friends in need.
“It’s just a nice thing to do, to be able to help out your friend,” she said.
Kash said she welcomed the feedback from all students and said dining services were working to reverse the recent change in enforcement.
This change was reversed at the beginning of last week.
“We need to do a better job working with housing and communicating that in our housing application. Those are some things we need to work on,” Kash said.
Going forward, Kash states they plan to meet later in the semester with SGA and Resident Student Association (RSA) to discuss the policy of meal swipes moving forward to the next school year.
