[Gsc-hca-family] Updates, no meeting this month

[Jason Walther]

Let me see if I can clarify the discussion with Dennis Collins about
the extended family policy. There were three major objectives that
arose from our conversation:

(1) MIT Housing could benefit from a knowledge of which apartments are
holding extended family and how many additional family members are in
those apartments. This is an important safety issue for large-scale
emergencies (such as fire or anything that might require evacuation)
as well as for any single-apartment crises or accidents. To a lesser
extent, the Eastgate and Westgate governments might also find it
helpful to know how many extended family members are in their
respective complexes as they plan social events.

(2) The Eastgate and Westgate communities could benefit from better
communication between MIT Housing and extended family members.
Extended family members often don't speak English and it can be
difficult for top-down announcements and policies to get communicated
to extended family, especially if the English-speaking family
member(s) are not diligently informing their extended family of these
things.

(3) The Eastgate and Westgate could enjoy better security if extended
family members had some way of accessing the buildings. (This was
especially a concern at Eastgate since it's in a more "busy" area with
more passers by.) Currently extended family don't have keys or cards
to get them into the buildings even though they have a legitimate
reason to be inside the building. This makes it difficult to enforce
building-wide policies of not letting others into your building or not
letting them tag along behind you as you enter.

It's important to note that in brainstorming a potential policy, we
did not have as one of our objectives a goal to limit the time period
that extended family could stay in an apartment. Dennis Collins felt
strongly that it would be inappropriate for us to try and impose some
sort of limit, and we agreed. By not imposing any sort of time limit,
we will not disincentivize families to participate in the policy.

The tentative plan that came out of the discussion was this --
Eastgate and Westgate each set up some sort of renewable access card
system for extended family members. If an extended family member wants
an access card to the building, they can arrange a meeting with the
house manager. Also required to be in attendance would be the
student/resident sponsoring the extended family member. At this
meeting, the house manager could get basic information on the extended
family member(s). The house manager could also communicate the basic
safety rules and community standards to the family member at this
meeting (via the English-speaking student if the family member does
not speak English themself). This would also be a good time for the
house manager to emphasize to the student that is their responsibility
to make sure that their extended family members continue to stay in
the loop with regards to any future housing announcements. At this
meeting the house manager would also give an access card to the
extended family member. The access card would be valid for a limited
amount of time (we didn't really discuss how long that time would be,
maybe 6 months, maybe 3 months, not sure yet). After that time
elapsed, the card would simply shut down and not work anymore. The
thought is that after the access card expires, another brief meeting
would have to be arranged to renew it. That way the house manager
could keep the list of extended family members up to date and would
have continuing opportunities to interface with these extended family
members.

I think this is a balanced plan -- both sides get something out of it.
MIT housing gets to know where extended family is staying. On the
other side, extended family members get more convenient access to the
buildings they are living in. Both sides will hopefully benefit from
opportunities for increased communication.

But before we can go any further on this, Dennis Collins needed to
check with their legal advisors and make sure that the basics of this
plan are even possible/practical. (There may be liability issues
introduced by making lists of extended family members that MIT would
rather avoid.) Even if the legal advisors sign off on this, however, I
should emphasize that our discussion was a preliminary step and futher
discussion/improvement of any policy plans would take into account
feedback and participation from our general Eastgate and Westgate
communities. In the meantime, if you do have feedback even at this
stage, feel free to send it on to Kevin Krsulich, Jason McKnight
and/or myself.

Also, Kevin or Jason M., if you think I miscommunicated anything in
this summary, or if I just wasn't clear or left something important
out, feel free to make corrections/additions to my comments here.

Thanks,
Jason


On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 9:27 AM, Andréa Schmidt <aews at mit.edu> wrote:
> Kevin asked that I forward some information to the whole gsc-hca-family
> list regarding a few of the projects that the committee is working on:
>
> I recently met with Dean Lerman regarding extending graduate student
> maternity leave, who seems very supportive of the idea, and thinks it's
> mainly a money issue. He is a little reluctant to accept departmental
> money because he would rather the policy be the same across the board,
> although he didn't rule it out (the Physics dept head was not so
> concerned about the money involved but had more implementation-related
> and fairness concerns).
>
> I also had a few comments on the topics discussed at the last meeting
> (apologies again for not attending). Regarding the Z-center, I do think
> it is worth pursuing, but perhaps with the support of a dean, such as
> the Dean for Student Life or the Dean for Graduate Students. There is a
> grad rep on the DAPER board (appointed through the GSC). You could try
> to get in touch with this person (if he/she exists) or have someone
> apply for the position if it is currently unfilled. The fact of the
> matter is that the Z-center likely thinks they will lose money on this,
> but if more people sign up due to the more attractive price, they might
> come out ahead. Also, from a fairness perspective, almost no
> organization charges the same rate for children as they do for adults
> and almost no children use athletic facilities as heavily as adults.
> Perhaps a little research on what local gyms charge for membership,
> including or not including children would help.
>
> Regarding extended families, my husband and I tried coming up with an
> extended family policy a couple of years ago with the old RLA, Dave
> Levy. It was a very futile endeavor. The basic reason is that if you
> make a policy, it will have to include a time limit (for example, your
> parents can only stay with you for one month or something like that).
> The problem is that people will not report their families in the same
> way that they don't report their kids when they're living in an
> apartment beyond its legal capacity. Their neighbors don't want to
> report it when parents are living there illegally (or children for that
> matter) because they don't want the parents to be deported or the family
> to be forced to move to a bigger apartment. The housing office basically
> turns a blind eye to what is going on. So at the end of the day, nothing
> actually changes, except that now you have a policy which no one who
> wants to violate the policy will follow. Anyway, I'm not trying to
> discourage you, but just trying to give you a little perspective on what
> has been done before and the pitfalls you might encounter. As GCs, my
> husband and I came to the conclusion that it would be better to have a
> policy on how to report *specific* guests who are violating the letter
> or spirit of the building rules, whether it be smoking on the playground
> or other offenses. These specific guests could be given a warning by the
> house manager after which point they would face possible eviction (or
> the threat of it anyway). We found in Eastgate that the majority of
> parents were minding their own business and not being a nuisance and a
> select few were doing menacing things. I don't know if that's the case
> in Westgate or not.
>
> Andréa
>
>
>
> Kevin Krsulich wrote:
>> All,
>>
>> I wanted to send out an update on what's been going on since we last
>> met. I decided not to hold a meeting this month for a few reasons, chief
>> among which was the fact that it didn't look like we'd have a
>> substantial enough agenda to justify getting everyone together,
>> especially when I'm sure people are getting increasingly busy with term
>> work.
>>
>> My hope is that we will be able to carry out light discussion over email
>> so that we can keep the committee in a more constant state of motion,
>> and then meet when we gather up an issue or two that requires more
>> in-depth discussion.
>>
>> So here are the current states of our outstanding topics :
>>    - Z center family access policy - Jason Walther has been in touch
>> with the Z-center's director of customer service who, after discussing
>> the issue with other Z-center administrators, responded that they have
>> no interest in adjusting their family access policy or pricing for children.
>>
>>    - GSC Survey - Within the past few days, I've received a copy of the
>> results of the GSC's most recent cost of living survey. It contains much
>> of the useful financial and statistical data you would expect
>> (income/expense info, dependents, childcare usage, housing stats) but
>> also as expected, does not include some of the items we discussed at our
>> first meeting (childbirth statistics, safety statistics, sources of
>> income, etc.).
>>
>>    - Parking and Transportion - Randall Lewis, Randy Churchill and I are
>> scheduled to meet with the Transportation and Parking Committee on Oct.
>> 28 to discuss the rate structure and lack of benefits for families
>> living on campus. We will likely be meeting within a week or so to begin
>> planning for this.
>>
>>    - Extended families - Jason Walther and I met with Dennis Collins and
>>  other members of the administration to discuss policy for extended
>> families at MIT's family residences. A tentative solution was to
>> implement a guest accomodation policy similar to that of Warehouse
>> (where spousal visits are common) where extended families are welcomed
>> to stay, informed of necessary safety and contact information, and in
>> exchange are given card and/or key access to the residence during the
>> time for which they've stated. The hope is that such a policy will
>> accommodate families who travel great distances while insuring that they
>> are welcomed, comfortable, and safe within the residence's community.
>>
>> So the outstanding questions are:
>>  - Do we want to pursue this Z center policy further?
>>  - Would a custom survey be useful to our work this year? What questions
>> would we include?
>>  - Is anyone else interested in helping with the meeting the the
>> transportation committee? The more people we have, the more convincing
>> an argument we can make.
>>  - Thoughts/opinions on a policy to accommodate extended guests at
>> family residences?
>>
>> Please feel free to reply all to discuss.
>>
>> I'll get out the minutes for the past meeting within a day or two. Sorry
>> for the wait. Feel free to email me or the list with updates, opinions
>> or items you'd like to discuss.
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>> Kevin Krsulich
>> GSC HCA Family Subcommittee Chair
>>
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>>
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