Diversity fee carryover causes concern

Groups funded by the diversity fee want to control allocation.

By Kaylen Ralph

Published March 22, 2010

A fee that funds minority student groups has faced carryover since its inception, and members of those groups say it's because of miscommunication and misallocation.

The Missouri Students Association passed legislation this month that maintains the fee amount — a recommendation from the Student Fee Review Committee that came without consulting the groups that receive the fee.

The fee, which every student pays $3.19 to maintain, covers all minority organizations on campus. Those organizations include the umbrella organization Four Front, the Legion of Black Collegians, the Hispanic American Leadership Organization, the Asian American Association and Triangle Coalition. Since it was first charged in fall 2007, the Student Fee Review Committee has never recommended an increase or decrease of the fee.

Legislation that maintains the fee was drafted by SFRC and passed through the Missouri Students Association last month as one of many resolutions regarding student fees.

In addition to maintaining the fee, the resolution documents SFRC's plans to review the consistent carryover associated with the fee.

But this clause has certain student organizations covered by the fee concerned for the future. Four Front Co-Chairwoman ChaToyya Sewell, a columnist for The Maneater, said she attributes the consistent carryover to the novelty of the fee.

"When we got the fee, there wasn't the institutional knowledge to spend it immediately," Sewell said. "There wasn't the infrastructure in place to suddenly spend $18,000, which is why we had carryover the past two years. Because we had to learn how to spend it, we could spend it on things that are crap, or we could try to learn how to spend it properly, which is what we did."

Before the fee was implemented, individual groups were responsible for finding their own funding, resulting in low operating budgets. Sewell said Four Front might get $300 a semester from various organizations, such as the Multicultural Center. Four Front now has a total expenditure of $24,952 for the past fiscal year.

Sewell said Four Front has gotten better at spending the money and does not anticipate carryover for this year. She said the main priority now is to make sure the fee is not lowered.

"We've gotten to a point where we've gotten the infrastructure to spend what we have, and we don't want it lowered," she said. "That's our primary concern."

Matt Sheppard, MSA budget committee chairman and SFRC co-vice chairman, said SFRC would investigate the fee and its carryover by meeting with all groups covered by the fee to see how they use it.

"Of course if money is there, people are going to say they're going to use it," Sheppard said. "But if they're not using it, it's one of those things like, 'Why are we charging students for it?' "

Both Sewell and Triangle Coalition President Erin Horth expressed concern over the responsibility MSA has regarding the approval and denial of SFRC's recommendation regarding the fee each year.

"There's a huge problem with allowing the majority organization, MSA, to allocate funds for the minority," Horth said. "We're concerned about the possibility of the diversity fee maybe being diminished at some point. I don't know if that would happen, but if the majority were to have the vote on minority rights there's no way to ensure that (the diversity fee) would stand."

Sheppard said no one from the various diversity groups approached him regarding consultation concerning the legislation. Sewell and Horth said no one communicated with them either. Sewell was asked by MSA President Tim Noce to go over the bill to point out mistakes in the listed percentages. In addition to misallocations, organizations no longer in existence, such as Four Directions, were slotted to receive a percentage of the funds listed as covered by the fee.

"Last semester, we were asked as groups of Four Front to submit budgets and carryover and to explain why we had carryover," Sewell said. "We were supposed to be brought in front of SFRC to defend those decisions, but we never were."

Sheppard said SFRC used prior legislation when drafting new bills and the error was most likely due to copying old information without checking it.

Sewell said the misinformation and lack of communication or consultation regarding its passage is somewhat indicative of the relationship between MSA and Four Front.

"It is an incredibly patronizing relationship at times, to be honest," Sewell said. "We're not consulted sometimes when we should have been, obviously like with this bill. I mean, essentially some of our projects have been appropriated by MSA, except that they don't understand the issues or the progress that we've made over several years."

This isn't the first time a lack of communication with minority student groups has caused confusion about the diversity fee. In 2008, the Department of Student Life diverted $30,771 from the fee to pay for new equipment without telling the groups that receive the fee.

Sewell and Horth both said they would like the organizations funded by the fee to be responsible for the allocation. Horth said some organizations are allocated too much of the fee while others, such as Triangle Coalition, are not given enough and dividing or sharing money could work better. For instance, Horth estimates 10 percent of students on campus are in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, but it only gets 5 percent of the diversity fee. That's compared to groups like HALO, which gets 15 percent of the fee when, according to 2009 fall enrollment records, about 2.2 percent of the campus is Hispanic.

"As of right now, some of us are going over budget, and some of us are struggling to spend it all," Horth said. "I think if we could work on dividing it up equally, we could probably do a lot more co-programming."

HALO Vice President Liz Reed said HALO is allocated too much and it could do with a smaller operating budget. She attributes this to being used to working with a lot less money before. She said the organization is unsure of how to spend its funds effectively to benefit the whole campus.

"There's so many guidelines about how we can use the money, and that really inhibits us," Reed said. "Sometimes there's an unclear line of if we can use it for an idea or not."