Full-time undergraduate students will now have the privilege of limited free printing in the University’s library.
The University and the Student Government Association have been working since last year on an initiative that would allow students a limited number of free pages to print from the library printers in Mortensen Library.
“It’s 50 sheets per student for the entire year, so its broken in half to 25 sheets per semester,” says Nora Kaszubowski, president of the Student Government Association. “To print one sheet of paper black and white, it’s 5 cents. So that’s where it works out to a $1.25 for the semester, $2.50 for the year.”
Students will be given a $1.25 credit for free printing in the library each semester, amounting to $2.50 for the entire year.
The free printing initiative works similarly to the current Hawk Cash system used for printing in the library. SGA worked with the ID Office to create a new account, separate from the Hawk Cash credit, that would first take from a student’s free printing credit before going back to charging Hawk Cash.
This initiative was originally started by former SGA President Maria Arroyo, who graduated in May of 2013. Taking office in September of this year, President Kaszubowski continued Arroyo’s work.
“The work was done last year in terms of finding a way to rearrange our budget, look at different things and analyze it, so that way we could move funds to the places where we wanted to move it,” she says.
Kaszubowski estimates that around $12,000 was reallocated from the Association’s budget to produce funding for the initiative.
Once a student has used up all 25 free pages, they will be charged 5 cents for each page printed after that. However, students will not be able to combine their free pages with any other printing jobs. They must be able to print out the appropriate amount of pages allotted in their free credit, or simply pay 5 cents per page to complete the printing job.
President Kaszubowski says the initiative will be monitored in the upcoming months, and if it shows potential, there is the possibility that more money could be reallocated and redirected to this initiative to allow students more free prints in later years.
