Empty news stands signal changes in the readership program.
Photo by Jessica Warren

As many of the newspaper stands across the Colorado State University-Pueblo campus are removed or sit empty, students, faculty and staff have been left with questions regarding the readership program that has been part of the university for the past few years.

In the past, members of the CSU-Pueblo community had been able to access free daily copies of newspapers like the Pueblo Chieftain, Denver Post, USA TODAY and The New York Times at a number of locations on campus.  The Student Readership Program provided the papers and was sponsored by the CSU-Pueblo Associated Students’ Government and the Office of Student Life as far back as 2009.

Until the fall 2014 semester, the program had been funded by student fees and contributions from academic and nonacademic departments on campus. Due to budget issues, changes were made regarding how student fees were allocated to the offices and programs on campus. The changes in student fee allocation had a significant effect on the funding for the readership program.

After the changes in student fee allocation, the cost of continuing the readership program for the 2014-2015 academic year became the full responsibility of the ASG and the Office of Student Life.

“To continue to fund the newspapers for this academic year, ASG and Student Life have cut costs in other programs and activities to keep the readership program going,” said ASG President Timothy Zercher.

In 2014, the ASG and Student Life reviewed the success of the readership program. Using the information they obtained from a utilization data report provided by USA TODAY, they concluded that the readership program was not as successful as they had hoped.

“ASG and Student Life believed that the program was underutilized based upon the utilization data,” Zercher said. “It was decided last year that some of the funding for the program could be put to better uses in other areas of student life.”

The two organizations have been trying to determine what to do with the readership program.

“There was talk of fully doing away with the program, but as this semester has progressed, we have received some comments from students and staff regarding the program,” Zercher said.

As a result of the feedback they received, the ASG and Student Life decided to continue the readership program with some minor changes. They opted to discontinue the least popular newspapers and reduce the number of newspaper stand locations on campus to two.

Newspapers can now be found in the Library and Academic Resources Center and the Occhiato University Center.

The contract for the readership program will expire at the end of the spring 2015 semester. Zercher said the ASG and Student Life will continue to review utilization data and make further decisions about changes to the readership program at that time.

“As things continue to change with the program, ASG will continue to make them (the changes) as public as possible,” he said.

CSU-Pueblo Student Engagement and Leadership hosted a spring summit on campus for student organizations on Wednesday Jan. 21. The event, which took place from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m., was hosted in the Occhiato University Center.

Student organizations were required to attend the summit, and each was expected to send one representative from their organization. Though it was preferred that representative be an executive elected officer, a registered representative was acceptable.

CSU-Pueblo currently has 51 registered student organizations.

“Not a lot of people realize how many student organizations there are,” said Freddy Correamanrique, an intern with Student Engagement and Leadership.

“Student organizations range from biology club, political science club to engineering. There is a club for every major on campus except mass communications,” Correamanrique said.

At the summit there were three training sessions for organizations to participate in. The first and last of the three sessions were hosted by members of Student Engagement and Leadership. The second session was hosted by the CSU-Pueblo Grant Accounting Coordinator, Valerie Pfingston.

The first session, “approved chalking,” was to discuss campus chalking policies. This covered all the approved and appropriate places on campus that organizations could promote using chalk.

The second session, “organization bank account practices,” hosted by Pfingston was designed to teach organizations how to be fiscally responsible with their organization accounts. This session provided student organizations an opportunity to get updated account information.

The third session, “student affair fees,” was “the most important session,” Correamanrique said. This session provided information about organizational grant for student organizations.

“Each year $40,000 in student fees are allocated for student organizations,” Correamanrique said. There are specific guidelines for how the funding can be used within the organization. This session gave a breakdown of “what organizations can and can’t do with money.”

The organizations that failed to attend faced a penalty. Those that didn’t attend lost good standing with Student Engagement and Leadership, which came in the form of a demotion to either a silver or bronze standing.

Standing placement has a significant impact on an organization’s involvement on campus. It limits the funding an organization can access, which in turn affects their ability to participate in campus activities and stay active on campus.

Currently there are three standing positions an organization can be placed in: gold, silver and bronze. Each standing coordinates with a percentage of grants and funding an organization has access to.

Organizations in the bronze standing, which is the lowest possible standing, cannot access any of the grant funding allocated for student organizations.

Information about Student Engagement and Leadership standings and other guidelines are provided to all campus organizations in the student organization handbook. Additional information about student organizations on campus and the Student Organization Handbook is also available to the public through the CSU-Pueblo website.

Student organization summits are held at the beginning of the spring and fall semesters.

“Making an American Workforce: The Rockefellers and the Legacy of Ludlow” details early Southern Colorado history. Photo courtesy of Fawn Montoya.

CSU-Pueblo professor Fawn Amber Montoya has worked to combine elements of Colorado history in a new academic book.

In “Making an American Workforce: The Rockefellers and the Legacy of Ludlow” Montoya incorporates tales of the Rockefellers, Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, Bessemer, the YMCA and the Ludlow Massacre.

The book also demonstrates the historical period’s impact on not only Southern Colorado, but also the United States as a whole.

The events and politics surrounding the Ludlow Massacre laid the foundation for the policies developed to preserve the rights of miners throughout the U.S.

Montoya said her book is a compilation of scholarly research done by Colorado historians. It chronicles the labor practices of management, the miners and politics.

It also describes the standard of living for the miners and their families.

Montoya is an associate professor of history at CSU-Pueblo. She was recently selected to join the board of directors for History Colorado and is co-chair of the Ludlow Centennial Commemoration Commission.

Montoya grew up in New Mexico, but spent plenty of time in Colorado as a child.

She said her family took frequent trips from their home in northern New Mexico to Pueblo. The granddaughter of a coal miner, she has always been interested in Colorado history.

Inspiration for her work originated in 1997 when Montoya did an undergraduate paper on Sarah Deutch’s “No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940” while studying at University of Arizona.

In 2009 Montoya was able to begin compiling all of the pieces to put together the elements of her book.

Montoya not only emphasizes the basic facts surrounding the Ludlow Massacre, but also details the personal lives of the Ludlow families.

In one chapter, Montoya discusses the living conditions of the miners and their families prior to and following the massacre.

She also explains the relationship between the Rockefellers and the YMCA in their efforts to improve both the social and living environment for the workers and their families.

Montoya said “Making an American Workforce: The Rockefellers and the Legacy of Ludlow” doesn’t necessarily need to be read from cover-to-cover.

“It’s really an academic book,” she said.

The book is formatted in a way that anybody could pick it up and use it for reference, she said.