Students who hold meal plans are now prohibited from swiping for anyone but themselves in the Caf, unless they want to use some of their five allocated semester guest meals.
According to GDS Vice President of Operations, Anthony Frungillo, that the Card Services brought the discrepancy of how the meals were being rung through and how the structure of the meal plan to the attention of GDS and put up the sign informing students on Oct. 20 after GDS had made the correction.
"This year with the transition to the blackboard system students were able to go outside of their paid privileges and swipe in a guest on their regular meals," Frungillo said. "Just to be clear the meal plans were never designed or allowed for this usage."
Director of Card Services, Mary Goff, explained that the switchover from the old, more "structured" system to the new Windows system allowed for the discrepancy. According to Goff, the old system had a re-use restriction period, where students could not re-swipe within a given time frame, guarding against people just handing out their card.
According to Frungillo, the "new" implementation of this rule mid-semester was not a "change." Rather, it is the policy that every meal plan except for Option IV restricts meal plan swipes to the plan holder.
"The regular meals are paid for to be used by the individual," Frungillo said. "Working with the University, we have added in with no additional charges guest meals to help overall satisfaction with the program.
Goff explained that Option IV is an exception to the rule because it does not offer any guest meals. Instead, it includes 12 regular weekly meals which re-set every Sunday night.
Goff also said that Card Services was not sure that students were actually using their meal plan for themselves.
"I put the sign up because they were having some issues, with just having swipes, with students coming in," Goff said. "They weren't sure that they weren't handing their card back to someone else."
According to Frungillo, it is GDS¹s responsibility with the meal plan system is to swipe the students' cards and to verify that the students' picture matches the student using the meal card.
