Dorm Council Revamped, Funding Cut
By Caitlin Collins
Staff Writer

As part of a continuing effort to improve residential life, Pomona has revamped the structure of last year’s Dorm Councils to form the new Residential Life Advisory Committee (RLAC).

Along with the new title, several changes have been made to the committee. Whereas last year there was a separate Dorm Council for each residence hall, RLAC is one central committee with a representative from each dorm.

“What we looked at was creating a smaller structure so that now we have one committee, whereas before we had eleven different councils,” said Associate Dean of Campus Life Frank Bedoya. “We have a cross-representation of people from just about every class, and we are in the process of looking for three more representatives from three specific halls so that we have representation from each hall.”

Furthermore, instead of students being elected to Dorm Council, there is now an application process.

“Instead of doing more or less arbitrary elections, we decided that it would be more effective to do an application process for people who are genuinely interested, who would be able to indicate what they were interested in doing and why they wanted to join,” said RLAC member Jessica Gale ’04.

This structural change is in response to the ineffectiveness of Dorm Council in past years.

“In many cases, you had first year students who ran for council positions who really didn’t know what the purpose was and what to do,” said Bedoya.

Now that the new committee has been formed, however, it already has a large difficulty to face—a budget cut.

“One of the disappointing factors is that last year’s Senate cut the amount of funding that is available to programs in residence halls considerably,” said Bedoya.

“While we are at a point of having a new committee and being able to move forward, we are also at the disadvantage of being cut considerably in the amount of money we have available this year.”

Specifically, RLAC has a budget of $1000 for the entire year, amounting to approximately 78 cents per student.

“We have kind of a limited budget, but we are hoping to do a lot of collaborative programming with other organizations,” said Gale.

Bedoya concurred. “We are going to do our best My guess is that students in particular resident halls who want to do programs will be approaching CCLA and the ASPC budget committee on a much more frequent basis to ask for funding.”

However, the committee is also serving as a resource for the Office of Campus Life, and residential life issues in general.

“One of the issues we are going to be talking about soon is how to better utilize space in dorms and how we can make lounge areas better,” said Gale.

With money set aside for this specific purpose, RLAC plans to solicit feedback from residents to find out what will make lounges more attractive and usable, and then go out and make additions and changes.

“The hope is that we will be able to show that this is an active and functioning group of people–to hopefully be able to increase funding for the group for Spring semester and then definitely for next year,” said Bedoya. “After all, we are a residential college, and so we want to make sure life within the halls is just as vibrant as it is off campus as well as in the classroom.”