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CSEA CONNECTION
by Nidal Kobaissi, CSEA president |
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What happened to the cafeteria? This is a question that has been on my mind for a few years. It seems to me that for many years we all stood by and watched the cafeteria slowly deteriorate. Every year the subsidy amount increased until we reached an amount over $100,000, and then it hit us… something was seriously wrong. We now know that the cafeteria can be self-sufficient, and we continue, as a community, to work at making it even more efficient. But what about all those years in the past? What were we doing? I started to add it all up in my head and came to a shocking conclusion. If you take the amount we spent every year for the past five years, you’d have over $300,000. That’s a lot of money! Money we could have used in other programs or during a fiscal crisis like the one we’re in now. Why did it take a committee to sit down and basically take apart the entire Food Services Department and reassemble it into a more efficient member of our community? Now that everything seems to be working well, what do we do? Do we dissolve the committee and hope that everything will be fine? Don’t even think about it: the committee should stay and should become permanent. The reason the committee was able to help the cafeteria was that the members acted as a conduit of information from the campus community. The members relayed the needs and wants for food venues and provided the cafeteria staff with information they needed to offer food that the community wanted to eat, not what they had to eat because it was the only thing there. All of this was made possible because faculty, staff, administrators and, most importantly, students came together and shared ideas and investigated options. The cafeteria staff have done an amazing job implementing every committee recommendation. I think they need to be thanked for their hard work. The next time you stop for a bite to eat on campus, let them know how great a job they’re doing. & |
