Pending approval, meal plan changes coming soon

02/25/2016

Kevin Burke
Content Editor

New meal plans may be coming to Bridgewater State University sooner than we think.

On February 29, the Board of Trustees will take a vote on whether new meal plans, which benefit students by giving more dining dollars in exchange for meal swipes, will go into effect.

The new meal plans, created by SGA and recently approved by Sodexo, were carefully crafted after studying the issue for over a year.

According to SGA President Anthony Hebert, the SGA began polling the student body in the spring of 2015, and found that meal plan options were often a big issue for many.

“We asked them how they felt about the amount of dining dollars and meal swipes they are receiving and the response from the majority of those polled was they would like more dining dollars,” said Hebert.

The SGA also reviewed the meal plan utilization rates from the past several years to see how many dining dollars and meal swipes were going unused by the student body.

Therefore, based on SGA’s polling as well as meal plan utilization rates, Hebert, along with other members of SGA, designed the followed changes to the meal plans

Numbers in bold are what the new meal plan options would potentially look like:

Gold Plan:

Meal Swipes: 210 → 190

Dining Dollars: 210 → 370

Silver Plan:

Meal Swipes: 75 → 75

Dining Dollars: 500 → 550

Platinum Plan:

Meal Swipes: 150 → 140

Dining Dollars: 700 → 780

If the Board of Trustees approves the new meal plan proposals, the changes will go into effect for the Fall semester, 2016.

Hebert spoke confidently of the SGA’s proposal however, and spoke highly of the organization’s drive to get this done, saying, “The SGA put a tremendous amount of effort into coming up with these changes to the meal plan options, and believe that the student body will benefit a great deal from the alternations that will be made.”

Kevin Burke is the Content Editor of The Comment. Follow him on Twitter @ke7inburke.