The hiring process for Housing and Residence Life’s student staff will look different from usual this year.

“If you complained about your work, whined about staff meetings, and did a poor job, you are likely not going to be invited back to your position,” Director of Residence Life Craig Seager said.

Seager said that in the 14 years he’s worked at UCA’s Housing and Residence Life, “returning RAs were always guaranteed to return to their same position, as long as they maintained their employment requirements,” but said the policy has contributed toward feelings of complacency and negativity among the staff. 

“All current student staff, regardless of their current position, will have to go through a new ‘returner’ process that we will be piloting and assessing,” Seager said, adding that a worker’s end-of-year performance evaluations will play a big part in their decision. 

“It is very likely that some residential complexes may have one or two fewer RAs,” Seager said, adding those positions “will be repurposed to other new student staff positions.

Seager said the buildings will have more overall staff and more support for residents.

He said the personnel changes were necessary in preventing student staff — especially RAs — from being overworked, and that recent research he’s done and published in the field says as much.

Seager said, “The duties and responsibilities of RAs have been significantly reduced without the pay changing,” and said he wasn’t aware of any significant changes to the Housing and Residence Life operating budget.

“Our student staff, RAs in particular, are required to do a lot more than ever before, and this has negatively impacted their mental health, academics, and job performance,” Seager said.

These negative effects on staff are why his department is creating 18 new positions for fall 2023. New positions include programming assistant, marketing assistant, complex assistant and maintenance assistant.

Seager said the department added maintenance assistants to provide “extra support” to residents and to allow professional maintenance to focus on “larger-scale housing maintenance issues.”

“[Maintenance assistants] will be trained by our professional maintenance staff to handle simple maintenance issues such as changing a light bulb or air filter, fixing a leak, fixing a sticky drawer, paint touch-ups or even adjusting the height of a stubborn bed frame,” Seager said.

Seager said the restructure would give students more opportunities to work for Housing and Residence Life because eligibility requirements will differ, like those based on GPA and semesters lived on campus.

“We have also created two additional senior resident assistant positions that offer some extra leadership experience to any student staff members that are looking at joining the College Student Personnel and Administration Master’s Program,” Seager said.

Seager said veteran RAs will not lose their veteran status or pay if rehired, and that the student staff recruitment committee’s work to promote the new positions is already underway for fall recruitment to begin in February.