Until Nov. 19, students will have an extra 50 cents of free printing.
ORACLE PHOTO/CHAVELI GUZMAN

Student Government (SG) has created a plan to extend the amount of free printing each student has per day. Until Nov. 19, SG is running a trial that will allow students $3 worth of printing rather than the $2.50 currently available.

Jennifer Bielen, assistant director of Student Government Advising, Training and Operations, said Student Body President Moneer Kheireddine decided to start the trial. He originally had the idea when he decided to run for office and put it as one of his platform points.

Since this is just a trial, it will only run for a three-week period. Bielen said Information Technology (IT) will pull the data to allow them to see last year’s statistics versus this year’s initial polls to determine if students are actually using it more.

“We communicated our thoughts and wanted to get the data to show how a change such as this would actually impact us,” Kheireddine said. “For years prior it was always stated that an increase would affect funding or cause problems with budgets, but we never actually had data to prove this.

“I️t seemed like a win-win in any case; we receive valuable data for us or future administrations to use in regards to printing budgets and our student body is able to print more for at minimum a few weeks.”

The idea had originated when Kheireddine and Vice President Shaquille Kent were running for office and decided their platform would be something students could frequently use. The trial’s purpose is to see how many students actually use the printers on campus and which ones are used.

“Essentially our team, Kent and I️ had seen the printing could often be a struggle for our students. That’s a given,” Kheireddine said. “We’d seen that while students had constantly voiced these complaints, action hadn’t been taken.”

Going forward, SG will see if this new 50-cent raise is feasible or not. It depends on when they can collect the statistics in December. While the trial is being funded by money allocated to the executive branch, according to Bielen, if the program becomes long-term a funding resource will have to be found.

“There’s a couple different avenues we’re looking into to secure an increase,” Kheireddine said. “I️t in all honesty I️t depends on the data we receive, because without knowing how much of an increase we'll need, we can’t reliably decide a method at the present moment to fund it.”