The Griffon News

Say that students work hours upon hours expecting a pay check every month but when the students go to claim their checks, they don’t have one. There are no records showing that they have worked.

Now with the new changes in student employment the issues have been confronted, students are able to claim their checks with no problems. Jeff Wilson, the director of career development and the new student employment, said the policy consists of a number of changes including a process of paper work to be completed by students before they work to ensure that students would have a check waiting for them on pay day.

“We just wanted to ensure that the process was correct and that students would have their paper work done, so that on pay day they would have a paycheck ready for them, and we needed all the departments to follow the same process so that it was extreme-line, centralized process,” Wilson said.

With the new policy came a lot of hard work and preparation. During this summer supervisors of jobs on campus were put through training sessions to learn about the new guidelines that were being put in place. Jan Aspelund, director of human resources said that this new policy is more put together than past years.

“Now the reason we went to this system is because we have had a lot of problems in past years with students going to work in departments and although they’re told to go fill out paper work, they didn’t necessarily do so and without having this paper work completed we could not put them in the payroll system,” Aspelund said.

Now, with the new rules in play there is a totally different process and students have to go through Human Resources to find employment rather than Student Employment. With this new move, students are now asked to fill out an employment package which includes authorization to work, payroll release form, tax forms, I-9 verification and social security card.

Aspelund said the reasons for requiring a social security card is because they’ve had so many considerable errors with social security card is because they’ve had so many considerable errors with social security numbers.

“By having a copy of a social security card, if there is an issue with the IRS on a social security number we physically have a copy of the card to use as our verification,” Aspelund said.

In addition to the new employment policy, students have new internet time sheets; the students now have to be set up in the system in order to enter their time. According to the Assistant Bursar Denece Huffman, switching to internet time sheets is much easier because it puts the responsibility back on the students to make sure that they are entering time accurately.

“I think it gives the students the ability to also make sure that their being paid for the time they’ve worked, rather then just signing a time sheet and hoping it gets to me. They know once they submitted it that their going to get paid,” Huffman said.

Also with the new student employment changes students are not allowed to work more than 20 hours a week. Aspelund said that there are a couple of reasons why students can’t work over 20 hours.

“Number one, we need to remember why students are here and that’s for academic purposes not for the supplemental work force for the University,” Aspelund said. “We also have limited funds available that are applied to student employment and federal work-study. We get approximately $390,000 from federal work-study at the going rate of $5.15 to $6.00 an hour, that amount will cover approximately 90 students in 20 hours a week for the academic year. So the 20 hours a week limit had to do with the use of the funds, the academics that needs to be the priority and a basic set of guidelines for the number of hours students could work. We have had issues in the past of students working 40 to 50 hours a week from multiple departments. There were concerns that over-time issues were not being address, but most importantly, it’s the fact that we need to remember that students should/and we should be putting academics first.”

Freshman Megan Anderson who is currently working as a work-study student at Missouri Western said that she thinks the decision to work over 20 hours should be up to the student.

“I think the supervisors should look at students’ grades to see that there is no problem and let it be up to the student, because every body is different,” Anderson said.

On the other hand Sophomore MiRita Smiley, who has two jobs- one on and one off campus thinks that the new change is good but could run into problems.

“It’s a good thing that you could only work 20 hours a week, but what if you already have your hours at 20 and another employer wants you to work for them—you can’t because you already have 20 hours,” Smiley said.