University of Maine undergraduate student senator Cynthia Shelmerdine has high aspirations for her fellow engineering students and is just getting started.

Shelmerdine, a Midcoast Maine native, is one of UMaine Student Government Inc.’s first-year students serving on the student senate. She doesn’t let this hold her back. Rather, she uses it to boost herself and other students.

During her first semester, she stated that being a student senator felt “a bit like imposter syndrome. It seems like not a lot of freshmen are doing it. It was daunting, but everyone is super friendly, and everyone just wants to help.”

“I was heavily involved in school politics when I was in high school, so I had looked for those same opportunities here,” she said. This led to her contacting the President of UMSG, Michael Delorge, with questions about involvement. She describes the student senate as “a collective goal that everyone is working towards,” be it funding clubs or writing acts to urge for valuable change on campus.

Shelmerdine is a biomedical engineering student concentrating in tissue engineering. Her dream job is to work in a laboratory focusing on organ genesis or regenerative medicine after she pursues higher education. Shelmerdine has a lot to navigate: her first year of college, being a woman in a STEM field and being the only student senator in the College of Engineering. She has hung up posters with her information to ensure that others feel heard, encouraging engineering students to reach out to her for representation.

Part of the reason for the advertisement is to encourage students to get involved. “I had so many conversations with [people in engineering] asking, ‘Oh, what do you do here?’ I’d say I’m part of [the] student senate. ‘Oh, what’s that?’”

“A lot of kids had no idea that [UMSG] was something that was an offer this school has. I remember one of the meetings the 3D Printing Club came in, and they had an issue because the Mechanical Engineering College was not giving them funding…I felt really embarrassed that they didn’t know I was there to help them,” she said, adding that she would have facilitated conversations between students and the department.

One of Shelmerdine’s favorite parts of UMSG is meeting new people from all majors, backgrounds and walks of life. “It was super interesting to be able to connect with all parts of the school at once and be able to hear so many people’s experiences,” said Shelmerdine.

Despite being new to UMSG, Shelmerdine says she has grown very comfortable with her constituency and fellow student leaders. “[UMSG Executives] have been very generous, inviting me to certain meetings like one with the Dean of Engineering…everyone wants to get involved. It’s a very nice community to be a part of,” she said.

To students who are nervous about getting involved, her advice is simple. “If you’re really passionate about it, it doesn’t feel like it’s a big, overwhelming task. Everyone is there to help you.”

Shelmerdine encourages students to reach out to her, especially her engineering student constituency. She can be reached at cynthia.shelmerdine@maine.edu.

Coffee, warm pastries and uncommon spices intermingle in the air. The chatter of regular customers greets you, and everything is a beautiful array of colors and products that are eclectic and familiar; these are the smells, sounds and sights of “The Store Ampersand.”

This little gem – equal parts general store, boutique and farmer’s market – carries fresh produce, Maine-made products, and gifts suitable for everyone you know. This shop offers products for all age groups, with an impressive selection of wine and local beers for those over 21 and adorable stuffed animals for the child at heart.

Art supplies and knits are tucked neatly in a corner, nestled between balsam fir pillows made in Maine. Most products are artisanal, many are created locally, and all are worth checking out. 

Whether you’re cooking a fanciful, frilly curry or just want a simple pasta for dinner, you’ll find every ingredient you need here. Snack mixes and flavorful chocolates are perfect picks for students in dorms, and you’re bound to find a beautiful pair of earrings for Mother’s Day and a Jellycat for your best friend at the same time. 

Operated by mother-daughter duo Roberta and Emilia Bradson, who you will usually find making lattes, stocking shelves, or chatting with regulars, the store is always abuzz— and the customer service is impeccable. 

Despite the store’s beauty, many University of Maine students don’t visit downtown Orono. Emilia Bradson believes that most who own cars drive to the usual stops: Hannaford, Aroma Joe’s and Walmart. Those without vehicles of their own don’t want to walk or utilize the bus to downtown.

However, you wouldn’t get coffee like this at a chain store. The French lavender latte is a favorite among customers, and their fresh, homemade pastries and baked goods are the perfect pairing. 

Even without a large college crowd, the family-run cafe and shop has withstood the test of time. The family bought it in 1995, but the owners attest that the store itself has been open for around 40 years. 

“We like being the best-kept secret,” Emilia said.

Though it may be “secret,” I’d urge you to make that journey over the bridge and down Mill Street — it’s worth it. 

After a long day, you probably want to go home, whether in a dorm, apartment or house, and unwind in your peace and comfort. After all, you are just a human being, and Maine winters are cold and exhausting both physically and emotionally. But the local people who have no homes are also human beings — and they get no rest, no relaxation, no shelter from the cold and thanks to recent decisions by the City of Bangor, certainly no peace. 

A recent encampment sweep by city officials has left unhoused people displaced and distrusting of the city they live in. The first thing to remember is that these people have families, friends, lives, passions, and dreams—they are no less deserving or less human than those of us lucky enough to have reliable living situations. The second thing to remember is that ousting them from their already inhumane occupancies is incredibly unfair and cruel.

It is no secret that Maine has a housing crisis. This is due to multiple factors — loss of jobs after the pandemic, a tumultuous economy, unfairly high rent and many more. But the real crisis isn’t the unhoused people – it is the disrespectful treatment, stigmatization and injustice these individuals face. 

Recently, I was fortunate enough to attend and cover a protest at the Bangor City Council advocating for the rights of unhoused people. Dozens of activists and community members were there, wearing bright green Xs like the Bangor officials plastered across the encampments of unhoused people. They carried signs stating that “visible poverty is not a crime” and “stop the sweeps.” 

Hearing from people who have faced or continue to face homelessness was sobering.

After I left work the day of that meeting, I drove home in my warm car, went to my cozy apartment and made myself a meal with food that I bought with money earned from my jobs. This is not the reality that everyone faces, not even college students. 

Brenna Jones is a University of Maine student whom I got the opportunity to speak with both at that meeting and at the Wilson Center’s Dinner and Dialogue on helping unhoused people last semester. During the latter interview, she mentioned her own experience with homelessness, which caused her to think beyond the stigma we apply to those in visible poverty.

Jones stated that living as an unhoused person is something of an “invisible identity” to others. As someone who lived in her car, she didn’t realize that even counted as being unhoused. The living situations of unhoused people can look as casual as couchsurfing or as blatant as living in tents and a multitude of situations in between.

How the question of whether or not to sweep an encampment is even controversial is staggering. Despite claims by officials that the sweep was only of a few people who had refused city services, its damage went much further than that, displacing large amounts of people and ousting them out of residences that are already inhumane and precarious. 

People often claim that encampments are “eyesores,” implying that seeing people in visible poverty is somehow offensive — not because they are forced to live in those conditions, but because those with more privilege and opportunity decide they don’t want to see – and therefore acknowledge — that humans in their communities are living without homes.

Shelters are also not always an option. The Bangor Area Homeless Shelter has 38 year-round beds and will open overflow areas in winter, per their website. There are over 100 unhoused people living in Bangor. Those who have substance use disorder are not permitted to stay at the shelter as all occupants must be sober. Without effective harm reduction strategies for people with addiction and a lack of shelter, these people are genuinely being set up for failure. 

Awareness is the first step in helping unhoused people. We can all help to stop stigma — visible poverty is not a crime, an eyesore or an offense. It is part of a community that is shameful only because we let others live in those conditions without adequate support. Unhoused people are people first—human beings with flesh and blood and dreams and personalities. They are just as deserving of basic human rights as those of us who are fortunate enough to have reliable jobs or wealthy families willing to support them. 

To get involved, volunteer at a warming shelter this winter and/or donate extra resources to mutual aid programs. Even something as simple as donating a coat to a coat drive will help someone to get through the winter.

It’s always a struggle to balance independence from your parents. Especially as a new student at a university, you have to figure out where you fall on the spectrum of parent involvement in your college career.  

The Facebook group “The Official UMaine Parent Facebook group” is the primary place to see every end of the parent involvement spectrum. The questions range from “What size rug will fit in an Oxford Hall room?” to “Something serious and dangerous happened to my student on campus. What’s next?” 

There’s a faculty member on a mission to act as a guide for these parents. Andi Bowen is the director of residence life at the University of Maine. The page started as an information page set up by the admissions and the first-year and transfer departments. It has since grown into a large page consisting of around 5,700 members. The page is most active between new student orientation and when classes start. I interviewed Bowen to check in on how the page interacts with the university.

“The parents were an untapped resource for us,” Bowen shared. The page allows for a new information chain. Students can pass information to their parents and have it reach helpful staff, or vice versa. This becomes something of a tool for faculty to pass information down to the parents and then subsequently to the student. “I’m kind of like an RA for the parents,” says Bowen, “so when they have concerns, they are bringing them to me, and I can make an appropriate referral.”

“25% of our first-year students are first–generation,” Bowen states. This further emphasizes the need for a parental guide — parents who have never attended college would struggle to know all the answers to help their students succeed. “I didn’t realize until I became a parent how scary this must be, to send your kid to school.”

There are concerns about privacy and independence, though. Some of the situations on campus involving new students are very sensitive. From roommate problems to health issues, there is oversharing and exposure on this page that could make a student upset or put them in a dangerous position. However, this problem has been helped by the addition of an anonymous posting option that allows the parent or student posting on the page to stay unknown. 

The question of student self-advocacy also arises. How are students going to prepare for the real world  when their parents have to speak up for them? The distinction is this group is not the only channel for information at the university. The students have the ability to talk through their own RA. They also have the ability to access all this information through campus groups and other campus resources. Now, parents have the same resources the students do.

Overall, the resources and information provided by this group do outweigh the potential loss of  independence for students. If helping a student be as successful as possible at the university is the goal, then it is understandable that it happens through the parents. Furthermore, the university should consider investing in parent support more often. Everyone shares the common goal of student success — and more support is always better than less. 

If you set eyes upon a University of Maine emergency pole, shining blue beacons of safety and promise, you might not be met with means to contact an emergency service. You could instead find a QR code persuading you to download an app while you frantically search for a way to escape your dire situation.

For me, personally, this glowing blue pole — cutting through a below-freezing, cloudy February night — was the saving grace of my walk home when a man I did not know attempted to speak to me and chase me down when I walked away. I wasn’t far into the 12 minute trudge back to Penobscot Hall from my friend’s dorm in Cumberland when I turned and ran towards the first glimmer of hope: a UMaine emergency pole.

I held onto it like a lifeboat while I frantically called my friend and asked her to open the door to let me back in. I spoke with the on-duty RAs, who were close friends of mine, in a hasty, hushed conversation and they walked me back home. I don’t know what would’ve happened if I wasn’t safely walked back, or if my friend missed my call and hadn’t opened the door, or if I was met with a box of black and white squiggles I was meant to scan. I’m glad I don’t know. 

The app, Black Bear Safe, seems like a wonderful idea on paper — you can share your walk with a UMPD officer, access mental health and support resources, submit crime tips and more. Even if it were better advertised and well-used, it cannot aid in all situations. Someone with a lost, stolen or dead phone still deserves to get home safely.

Memphis Peterson, a third-year political science student, is a current senator with UMaine Student Government and serves as the student body security representative, where he hears student concerns about safety and security and represents the opinion of the over 10,000 students of this campus. 

“While I was made aware last semester that there would be a rollback of the blue lights, the current situation is strange,” Peterson stated. “On the whole north side of the campus, where most of the freshmen are, there are only two active stations.”

Peterson added that he’s received many ideas from students that, in addition to Black Bear Safe, could create a much stronger sense of security. “Outdoor lighting during dark hours is another common complaint, with some concerning generally dark areas on campus…I’ve heard my peers refer to them as ‘anti-drug’ or ‘anti-rape’ lights,” he said. 

Our safety resources at this campus are strong. UMPD and UVAC both have generally good response times and case handling, according to Peterson. RAs and CAs are trained to receive Title 9 reports and help their residents with reporting crimes like harrassment, sexual assault and rape. The Counseling Center provides free therapy for students and has multiple mental health resources for the larger community. 

Even the Black Bear Safe app itself is a phenomenal resource, with contacts for nearby police stations, emergency preparedness and a section for crime reporting. The issue comes when these services are underutilized due to being unknown by a majority of students. The first thing a new UMaine student should know is how to protect themselves in an emergency and the people that are on their side.

Students need and deserve a quick safety resource beyond their phone. Having a UMPD call button still active on parts of campus would help to fill in a good amount of the holes in campus security. Having better advertisement of the app in conjunction with other resources like the emergency poles would keep people safer.

UMaine may be a smaller and safer campus than many other schools, but there is still a true and unavoidable danger that comes with any community. Students deserve to be respected and have their safety prioritized. 

Dean of Students Robert Dana was quoted in a recent email regarding cases of projectiles thrown at people on campus, saying, “No one should ever be subjected to any sort of harassment as they walk across campus…Working together, we can put an immediate end to this hurtful behavior and help assure our campus remains a safe and welcoming environment for all.” 

The first step in making sure our campus is safe and welcoming is having a plethora of resources available, which we do. The second step is making sure students know when, why and how to use them.

Tamra Benson is an extremely busy University of Maine student –- not just because she’s a graduating senior, in the Honors College or undertaking leadership roles in many different organizations — but also because she made her Honors thesis into an incredibly impactful, beneficial community service project. 

Benson’s thesis explored the interest behind a mutual aid fund — it started out as a curiosity, but as of Saturday, April 22, it is an almost fully realized organization for students in times of need. Black Bear Mutual Aid is getting started to help folks who need anonymous, judgment-free aid. 

Outside of this project, Benson has her hands full: she is a political science student with minors in legal studies and leadership studies, and through the multitude of clubs she’s in, over $1,000 dollars have been raised for the mutual aid fund so far. 

“[UMaine has] a lot of people struggling, and resources that exist here are great, except they leave a lot of people behind and so I want to say create something that would help the people who are left behind — and somebody had to do it,” Benson said.

Mutual aid is defined by the University of Georgia’s School of Social Work as “when everyday people get together to meet each other’s needs.” 

To Benson, this is an incredibly valuable thing that UMaine can offer more of, – specifically through a fund that allows people to anonymously access money to help pay for food, purchase medicine, provide transportation and more.

A post on the mutual aid fund’s Instagram page — @blackbearmutualaid — explained the foundation as “solidarity, not charity.” 

The fund, when set up, will be fully available to all students, faculty, and staff for donation or deduction. Plans for the fund are in the final stages, as a bank account is being formed and people are stepping in to help run it. 

“The whole purpose of creating this bond is not just to alleviate economic hardships, but also to change the culture and the systems that we’re living in so that we don’t have as much harm to alleviate in the future,” Benson stated. 

Mutual aid is nothing new — we’ve been participating in it for years with clothing swaps, food pantries and volunteering. 

“It’s important to recognize that this mutual aid fund is not to replace any of the aid systems that exist currently on campus,” Benson explained. “It’s meant to supplement them because these kinds of aid that we have here are really great, and they’re wonderful resources.”

The only issues are sometimes people feel embarrassed due to stigma around asking for help, on-campus resources feel inaccessible or under-advertised, or someone needs money rather than a ride or a meal. 

Benson encouraged anyone in a position to donate or help do so, and discussed the responsibility students have to helping their community. “If you are privileged enough to have resources to give, it can be a responsibility of yours. You can make it a responsibility of yours to give back to the community. It serves you and has provided you with the life that you have and make other people’s lives better in the process,” Benson said. 

Tha Mutual Aid Interest Form Benson started is a great way to reach out, as is the Mutual Aid email address – blackbearmutualaid@gmail.com. The fund’s organization meets every other Saturday in the Oakes Room.

The University of Maine’s professor of family relations and human sexuality Dr. Sandra Caron was inducted into the Maine Women’s Hall of Fame on Saturday, March 18, an award commemorating her 35 years at UMaine and outstanding commitment to sexuality education.

To say Caron’s career is expansive would be an understatement — she spent three decades researching and surveying the habits of college students when it comes to sexuality. She has served on over 100 thesis committees, authored or co-authored dozens of scholarly articles, written and published several books and directly taught over 25,000 UMaine students as an alum herself.

A Bangor-Brewer area native, Caron attended UMaine for her undergraduate degree in health and family life education, graduating in 1979. She also obtained her master’s degree in human development here at her alma mater in 1982, later graduating from Syracuse University with a Ph.D. in human development in 1986.

Her experience at Syracuse connected her with world-renowned sex educator Sol Gordon, and she later went on to work at Cornell University. Late UMaine associate professor of child development and education Lloyd Brightman — Caron’s former advisor, whom she kept in close touch with throughout her postgraduate career — encouraged her to take his spot after his retirement.

“When I came back, I took over from him, teaching his courses,” Caron explained in her interview. “And I have been here for 35 years…I also was very involved in peer education when I was here as a student, and when I left I developed this peer sexuality program that became a model for schools all over the country.”

This led Caron to focus on more peer education opportunities at UMaine upon her return, starting the program Athletes for Sexual Responsibility.

She also ran a column here in Maine Campus Media — the longest running column in a college newspaper — titled Sex Matters, where she answered student questions about sexuality.

In addition to her Hall of Fame induction, Caron received two out of the three UMaine Presidential awards: the Presidential Outstanding Teaching Award and the Presidential Public Service Award. In 2019, she was awarded the Distinguished Maine Professor award, something she described as the pinnacle of her career.

“My parents always said education was so important,” Caron said. “But yet, when it came to sexuality, there wasn’t much of it.”

This sparked her desire to become a sex educator, focusing on women’s health, the understanding of women’s health and inclusivity of the LGBTQ+ community.

The Maine Women’s Hall of Fame is displayed at UMaine Augusta’s Bennett D. Katz Library.

“I’ve looked up to many of these women,” Caron said of her fellow inductees. “Think about their contributions in fields like science, the arts, health, education, athletics; it’s pretty hard to believe. It’s pretty amazing what they’ve done to improve the lives of girls, and everyone, in our state.”

In her induction remarks, Caron extended this gratitude toward her Hall of Fame predecessors.

“It is humbling to be among these prestigious women who have broken all those glass ceilings,” Caron said. “It is also significant that I am being inducted at a time in my life when there is a woman governor, Janet Mills, a woman president of the University of Maine, Joan Ferrini-Mundy, and a woman dean of my College of Education and Human Development, Penny Bishop. We have come a long, long way.”

Despite her incredible impact on UMaine, the community as a whole and over 25,000 individuals, Caron acknowledged that sex education is an underrepresented field and often uncomfortable to some.

“At my 10 year high school reunion, someone came up to me and said, ‘Remember when you wanted to be a sex educator? What are you doing now?’” Caron said.

Now, Caron is a highly awarded professor awaiting her retirement; the 2023–24 school year will be her last as a UMaine professor. She encourages students to enroll in human sexuality courses and to stay open-minded, compassionate and positive when getting involved in sexuality education.

On Thursday, March 6, the Wilson Center at the University of Maine held another weekly “Dinner and Dialogue” session for an incredibly relevant cause: houselessness in the nearby community and beyond.

Dozens of faculty, students and community members joined together over vegetarian Cuban sandwiches handmade by Wilson Center volunteers, and then listened to an in-depth panel on helping those without houses.

The National Health Care for the Homeless Council, which presented at the event, explained the difference between a person who is unhoused and one who is precariously housed.

A person who is unhoused does not have a secure or sufficient place to stay overnight, while a precariously housed person is at risk of becoming homeless within 3 months in the case of income loss. Precariously housed individuals also include those who require other incomes for housing or who stay with friends.

McK Mollner, a UMaine graduate student and event panelist, delivered opening remarks. They first got involved in housing insecurity work via involvement in housing initiatives in their home state of Virginia, specifically focused on helping LGBTQ+ young adults without homes.

“Queer youth are at almost double the risk for houselessness as other young adults,” Mollner explained. “[For] trans young adults ages 18 to 25, almost 1 in 4 will experience homelessness in their lives… That was something near and dear to my heart as a trans person.”

The passion exuded by the attendees was further underlined by the dire reality of the subject.

“While it’s hard to say at every college campus, somewhere around 7% of college students experience homelessness or housing precarity during their college careers,” Mollner added. “Because of this, I wanted to put together this panel…to raise awareness and bring attention to what services there are and what services there aren’t, so we as a community can learn to better support each other.”

The Wilson Center panel consisted of Mollner and three other individuals: Jamie Beck, executive director of Bangor houseless support nonprofit Dignity First, Rob Laraway, member of the Orono Town Council and Brenna Jones, mathematics and sociology student at UMaine whose research focuses on helping unhoused individuals.

Beck presented information on Dignity First, a 501(c)(3) Housing First nonprofit organization based in Bangor, Maine. Dignity First focuses on respecting unhoused people and focusing on getting them into stable living spaces without a focus on sobriety, but instead concentrating on support and community.

Community First, which Beck describes as a tangential organization, takes these pillars and focuses them into a vision of a community-based village for unhoused people that provides living spaces and support as well as intentional neighbors who live in the village to support formerly unhoused people. There is one model of this in Austin, Texas where fresh food is grown in village farms and used to feed people. While it will be a little while before this is seen in the greater Bangor area, Beck excitedly shared that Dignity First is working on their first tiny house for an eventual village.

Laraway shared his experience both as an involved Orono town council member and as a formerly houseless UMaine student, sleeping in music buildings and eating from a broken vending machine until he started staying with different friends. He recalled a professor instructing him to drop her class when he couldn’t afford to buy a textbook, which was ironic given the class’s focus on individuals who were held back in education by disabilities.

As a council member and community organizer with Maine People’s Alliance, Laraway now focuses on helping people in unhoused situations like he once experienced. This can look as simple as public transportation.

“One of the reasons I was dealing with precarious and unhoused situations when I was in school is that I did have a spot I could’ve slept in in Bangor, but the buses didn’t run. I had classes. I had to choose between having a place to sleep and maintaining my status as a student trying to further my education,” Laraway said.

Laraway explained that while resources are much less than satisfactory, applying for general assistance can help with living costs, as can Maine Health and Human Services.

Jones is the coordinator of UMaine’s Peace and Justice Center and has three leadership roles with the Greater Bangor Houseless Collective. She shared her houselessness experience living out of her car in high school and not even knowing that qualified as unhoused.

“Being unhoused is often an invisible identity to a lot of people, even if you don’t think that it would be. It doesn’t always look like someone living on the side of the street, it doesn’t always look like someone living in a tent by the river, it looks like a lot of forms,” Jones said.

She devotes Sundays to sharing food with unhoused people in Bangor, as well as creating a sense of community and conversation.

“The main thing I’ve taken away from [working with Greater Bangor Houseless Collective] is that these are just people,” Jones stated.

Assistant professor of sociology Dr. Brian Pitman works with Jones on houselessness research and shares many ways to get involved on a faculty level.

“There are definitely plenty of opportunities to connect with organizations that those of us are doing at the university. Trying to divert funding from the university directly to these directly impacted communities is one way, whether it is through internal grants that provide food to those experiencing housing and food insecurity or a faculty/staff mutual aid group, as I can only imagine that, like grad students, our faculty and staff are having their own issues with housing precarity and food insecurity,” Pitman stated.

“In general, our faculty and administration should work to financially, emotionally and socially support student workers… students in general, and each other, as housing, food, heating and almost all other costs continue to sky-rocket and more people continue to suffer from these debilitating conditions,” Pitman said.

As the University of Maine searches for a new Vice President of Enrollment Management, three finalists have been chosen to give open-campus presentations to get a public vote on who is the best candidate for the job.

Dean of UMaine’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and chair of the search for a new VPEM Emily Haddad shared that the search has been going smoothly.

“We’re on schedule, and we have a great group of finalists,” Haddad said.

Out of privacy concerns and respect for the finalists, it has been requested that the candidates’ names not be shared.

All three candidates are giving open-campus presentations, where anyone is welcome to join and any UMaine affiliate with a maine.edu email is encouraged to give feedback on the finalists.

Two of the three finalists were welcomed by the Wells Conference Center this past week on Tuesday, Feb. 21 and Thursday, Feb. 23. The remaining candidate will be holding their presentation in the conference center on Monday, Feb. 27.

Each candidate will deliver a 45-minute presentation in which they detail past and present UMaine undergraduate and graduate enrollment trends. They also will share their thoughts on improving enrollment and retention for the UMaine System, especially UMaine and UMaine at Machias.

These open-campus presentations are a normal hiring procedure that were unfortunately halted due to the pandemic, Haddad explained.

The next VPEM has a tentative start date of July 1, 2023.

Dozens of community members and faculty have turned up to observe the candidates and ask questions. The meetings are also accessible via Zoom and there is a Google Form for feedback.

For more information, visit this webpage, complete with details about the search committee and more of what the position entails. Copies of the candidate’s CVs are also available to anyone with a maine.edu email address.

The University of Maine and University of Maine at Machias’s President Joan Ferrini-Mundy focused on the many changes facing staff and students today at her second town hall meeting of the semester. She discussed important budget information, the status of Maine Day and student nutrition concerns.

The town hall, which took place on Nov. 16, featured a diverse array of panelists welcomed and introduced by Ferrini-Mundy. These speakers included Robert Dana, dean of students and vice president for student life and inclusive excellence; Norm Jones, interim vice president for enrollment management; Kelly Sparks, vice president for finance and administration and chief business officer and seven other panelists who did not have their own presentation.

“[This is] the first semester that is close in style and formatting to what was typical before the pandemic,” Ferrini-Mundy said.

The town hall’s purpose is to educate staff members, students and the University of Maine System’s community as a whole on vital changes that directly impact them.

The recent meeting dealt directly with major student concerns, namely dining services switching to new provider Sodexo, the fate of Maine Day and the current budget and its unexpected gaps.

Sparks tackled the Sodexo concerns during the town hall, which marked her fourth week in the position.

“We are exploring dining services with Sodexo,” Sparks explained. “We are looking forward to continuing to serve our students in a high-quality way, but being able to expand … through a partnership with Sodexo.”

For students, this partnership means the dining halls may be renovated in the next one to three years. Sparks acknowledged the focus on helping staffing issues and the consideration of bringing back Oakes Room and Wells Central if possible, as well as extending hours of operation for student convenience.

“[We hope to lower costs] while continuing to focus on sustainability, local sourcing, and food insecurity.”

She also encouraged students to voice their concerns about the partnership. One way to do this is through dining conversations that will be happening on Dec. 7 and 8. Information about these meetings can be found in student emails and dining halls.

Another key issue on the forefront of student minds is Maine Day — a longstanding tradition of a day free of classes for community service, which has been called into question due to concerns about off-campus partying. While Dana acknowledged that Maine Day traditions have a long history, he expressed his deep concerns about the partying situation.

“There’s been a legitimate call to action … by many people across the campus, wanting to know what we’re going to do about this,” Dana explained.

Dana reflected on the next steps to figure out the future of Maine Day.

“We did take an initial look at this with the president and her cabinet,” Dana said. “We’ve talked to students and many other constituents, and recently we went to the faculty senate to have the discussion.”

Ferrini-Mundy has put in place an advisory task force to deliberate and advise on the best interests of students and UMaine as a whole.

“We’ll have people representing the entire campus on the Maine Day rebranding committee,” Dana explained.

He added that the focus of this committee is on what Maine Day should look like going forward.

“What do we want it to be? How do we want it to be? How can we increase service and reduce risk? Students have engaged in this discussion very effectively,” Dana said.

Jones spoke about 2022’s student enrollment rate.

“I want to say what a wonderful place this is: I’ve been here now five weeks, and the sense of place that I see is exciting … to represent from the enrollment standpoint,” Jones said.

Jones focused on connecting with accepted students to encourage them to enroll in the University of Maine System. While enrollment numbers may be on the lower side currently, UMaine Machias saw over a 50% uptick in transfer students for the fall 2022 semester.

“[We hope to] create digital conversations with students around an academic program,” Jones said.

Enrollment initiatives for fall 2023’s incoming students include quick admission decisions, earlier financial aid awards, social media strategy and improved digital campaigns.

Both undergraduate and graduate enrollment was below what was included in the most recent budget, leading to low numbers of students and low numbers for finances. Sparks spoke about revisions to the 2023 financial year budget and exactly what implications lower enrollment has on campus budgeting.

The fiscal year 2023, which started on June 30, 2022, has a budget of just under $400 million. The original budget was approved by the finance, facilities and technology committee of the Board of Trustees last year. A strategic use of reserves has helped to balance the budget while tuition rates remain unraised and salaries are increased.

Sparks discussed budget reserves and how they work. In this budget, $34 million is allocated for education and general fund, referring to academic purchases, such as research staff, things the university runs and meeting the academic mission of students. $68.1 million is in the designated fund, focused on projects and infrastructure.

To fix budget gaps, Sparks explained, some expenses must be removed from the budget such as revenue enhancement. These funds came from things like fees or returned overhead from research grants.

Sparks stated that the focus is on retaining key values like academics, athletics and research and reallocating funds with those priorities in mind.

“Work together to get us to the endgame,” Sparks said, emphasizing community involvement in this process.

Ferrini-Mundy relayed information about various other positive developments. These include semifinal interviews being conducted in the search for a new UMaine Athletic Director and a new UMaine Machias campus director. Ferrini-Mundy also talked about UMaine alum and former Black Bears Baseball player Jeremy Peña making his recent MLB debut.

“There is an abundance of good news always, and it’s important to stay focused on that,” Ferrini-Mundy said.