ROTC priority scheduling approved by BFC

The Bloomington Faculty Council passed a resolution to allow ROTC students the same priority registration as student athletes at its meeting Tuesday.

Beginning in March, ROTC students will have priority registration to sign up for the fall semester.

Professor Jim Sherman, faculty president elect and chair of the Educational Policies Committee, brought the resolution to the council.

“This meeting is not about priority registration for student athletes,” Sherman said. “It does raise the point that if there’s another group on campus that is desirous of priority registration, their credentials, their situation if you will, really should be compared to student athletes and OK’d to have such priority registration.”

ROTC students have certain time restraints in which they aren’t able to sign up for classes due to ROTC obligations.

The IU Student Association Student Body Congress, according to the resolution, first brought the resolution to the IU Office of Enrollment Management.

Currently, ROTC students sign up for classes with the rest of the student body, and cannot always sign up for required classes at times that they are able to attend class.
This can sometimes hinder ROTC students ability to graduate on time.

“It’s definitely the case that there will be a few more students who will be getting priority over students like myself who don’t have those extra restraints of an ROTC student,” Scott Borer, vice president of Congress said.

However, he said it is important to realize that having already looked at athletes, which is a group of students, adding ROTC students to priority registration would hardly affect students who sign up for classes at the normal time.

“The registrar’s office can do this easily with very little trouble and very little impact with other students and their registration on campus,” Sherman said.

The council also discussed potential improvements to IU’s emergency preparedness plan, including fixing glitches with the IU Notify system.

IU currently uses a commercial program to send out IU Notify notifications, said Mark Bruhn, associate vice president for public safety and institutional assurance.

“For what it’s supposed to do, it does OK,” Bruhn said.

Two major issues with the current system are that there is no way to be selective in who receives notifications in terms of weather or not most people are on vacation, and that there is no way to determine where you might go in an emergency situation, Bruhn said.

IU Notify will soon also have a way to change an individual’s preferences in the way they receive messages.

That way, a person may not have to be notified by text, phone and email, Bruhn said.
“What we have to consider is how we’re going to get to the largest percentage of people,” Bruhn said.

Debbie Fletcher is the IU-Bloomington director of emergency management and continuity.

“We’re always trying new ways to make it as effective as possible,” Fletcher said.

Follow reporter Kathrine Schulze on Twitter at @KathrineSchulze.