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The Student News Site of Saint Louis University

The University News

The Student News Site of Saint Louis University

The University News

BSC now closing at midnight

New semester to bring new hours.

Do you know what time it is? Students using the Busch Student Center late at night should probably check their watches, as the operational hours of the building have changed. Starting this semester, the BSC will continue to open at 7 a.m., but will now be closing at midnight, two hours earlier than in previous years.

“When making this decision, we looked at cost effectiveness and the number of people who were using the building,” Cindy Bush, BSC building coordinator, said.

The BSC uses a system called People Tracker, which monitors the number of people who enter the building throughout the day and tracks the amount of usage the building gets.

The former manager of the BSC, Chris Grabau, looked at the numbers reported by People Tracker and saw that the building had very low traffic between the hours of midnight and 2 a.m.

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“We usually have two desk workers who stay until the building closes,” Bush said, “It didn’t make sense to keep them there during those hours.”

According to Bush, the new hours were proposed to the Student Government Association last semester. SGA agreed that the reduced hours seemed reasonable.

The primary concern Bush heard when implementing the new times was in regards to events in the building that may run late and how the building administration planned to deal with the issue.

“Most student groups are done with their meetings by midnight,” Bush said, “but if an event runs past midnight, we are willing to accommodate. It won’t be a regular thing, but we are willing to keep the building open for events.”

The student center got the message out about the new hours through the BSC directory, digital signage, Facebook and Twitter.

“Not many people are using the building past midnight anyway,” junior Tony Burton said. “I don’t think this will be a really dramatic change.”

Not every student is happy with the new building hours, however.

President of SLU-TV and SLU weather man, David Koeller, sat in on the meetings in which the hours change was decided. He felt the reduced hours limited his organization’s ability to work effectively.

“For SLU-TV, we often have projects or shows that continue late into the night,” Koeller said. “A lot of the students who work at SLU-TV don’t have time to work during the day and often work at 9 or 10 o’clock at night, and it takes longer than an hour to get a project done. If we have to leave at midnight, that will cut into our production time.”

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