Letter to the Editor
Showing some respect
Special to the Ebbtide
I would like to address the issue between the faculty and staff members here at Shoreline Community College (SCC) and the students. Recently I’ve been noticing that while the students are treated fairly inside the classroom, the opposite is true for outside the classroom. For example, last week the students were required to leave the PUB to accommodate a multicultural event, but at the same time the canteen was also being used. The only option for the students was to be in the faculty/staff lunchroom - or of course outside in the pouring rain. The students who were sent to the faculty/staff lunchroom for less than half an hour were treated with such disrespect from certain staff members (who I guess decided thought they might catch some disease by merely eating lunch in the same room as students).
I would just like to point out that the faculty and staff are here for the students, and without us there would be no college. Now this goes both ways of course, the students are also here for the faculty and staff, and without the faculty and staff there would be no college. If we could just meet on a common ground and treat each other with the same respect inside and outside of the classroom, this college would function much more efficiently. As a campus, we wonder why FTEs (full time enrollments) are dropping so dramatically. Have we ever considered that one factor may be the unwelcoming feeling students receive on this campus? I know myself and a great deal of other students feel as if we are an inconvenience to the faculty and staff. Now I’m not saying that all faculty members are bad, there are quite a few who are very helpful in and out of the classroom and who treat everyone equally. In fact I’ve had the honor of being taught by many of them.
I guess what I am asking for is a general awareness. Instead of walking around the campus with your noses in the air, ignoring students, step off the pedestal, suppress your egotistic tendencies, and smile once in a while. Now as difficult as this sounds, it really doesn’t take that much effort, and it makes us students feel welcome and accepted. I am a student here at SCC, and an hourly worker, and I see conflicts with communication here every single day. I think we all need is to respectfully speak our minds and bring up these issues so we can work on them as a team to benefit the future of this campus.
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