Jonet’ Washington
Staff Writers
As many may already know, the scheduled hours for Jackson State University’s dining halls and restaurants were cut back, which became effective as of October 31, 2016.
Since the hours have been cut back, students with meal plans have had to adjust their daily eating schedules to accommodate the changes that have been made to the dining hall business hours.
The biggest problem for Daria Beard, a sophomore music technology major from Little Rock, Ark., who is also a member of the Sonic Boom, was the Heritage Dining Hall changing their dinner hours to start at 5 p.m. to 4 p.m.
“Our practices start at 5 o’clock, and we don’t get out until 10 o’clock. I needed that hour to eat because when I get out, the only thing on campus that’s open is Burger King and I don’t have money to keep spending there,” said Beard.
Amani Jackson, a freshman speech communications major from Greensboro, N.C., also spoke about her experience with the new dining hall hours.
“It’s just such an inconvenience for everyone. Everyone pretty much had a set schedule to when they can eat and even worked it around their class schedules, now everything is just different and I don’t have time to go eat and that’s really sad.”
Chris Mongeon, the general manager of SodexoMagic was asked to give an explanation of what the initial reasoning was for changing the hours in the dining hall.
“I guess the biggest reason for the hours changing was that one of the residence halls on campus is closed for renovations, and those 300 students who used to be on a meal plan were not this year. Since the seats are limited so there was no reason to be open between hours when the counts went down by so much.” Said Mongeon.
Mongeon also explained who actually determined the new hours.
“Believe it or not, the students determined the new dining hall hours. The traffic flow of students in the dining halls was recorded each time they swiped their cards.”
The new dining hall business hours are still posted outside each facility.
