During the weeks following winter break when the AUTO program was shut down, Community Service Center operations were forced to adjust to accommodate for their loss of the usual mode of transportation.
DC Reads lost tutors who could not find ways to travel to their sites, and this year’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service spent an extra $2,000 on transportation in the absence of AUTO.
DC Reads involves 300 students who travel to six different sites in the District, largely in Columbia Heights and Anacostia, according to Robin Adams, assistant director of the Community Service Center and coordinator of DC Reads.
Usually, 30 DC Reads tutors are transported per day, Adams said, but with just one Community Service Center-owned van, a maximum of 12 students can be transported at a time, Adams said. Instead, DC Reads groups traveled to sites using the Metro and city buses.
Madison Pollock, a sophomore in the School of International Service and a volunteer at the Community of Hope site in Columbia Heights, said she formerly used the Community Service Center van free of charge to transport 20 other volunteers to a volunteer site. While AUTO was offline, other sites had to use the Community Service van and Pollock had to substitute city buses for the van.
“[The bus] is not free ... Besides the financial aspect, it is really inconvenient and unreliable,” Pollock said in an e-mail. “The bus has been making us late most days to our site.”
The necessity to use public transportation made traveling to the volunteer sites more challenging for students in all the programs, Adams said.
“Most of our students in our program are freshmen who are new to the city and have a busy academic and social calendar,” she said.
During the weeks after winter break, DC Reads lost five members, according to Adams.
“[This] is significant because that’s five children who no longer have someone providing one-on-one attention to them, and that’s five children who we have to figure out what to do with in terms of still getting the services,” Adams said.
The AUTO program started offering the use of four vans, available during office hours this Monday; usually there are nine vans available for use. The Student Government suspended the program at the end of last semester to help improve service and repair the vans, The Eagle previously reported.
The Community Service Center’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service happened to fall during AUTO’s previous brief time out of commission.
As a result, the AU Community Service Center had to factor an extra $2,000 in its budget for the event. This money could have gone toward supplies and food, according to Donald Curtis, the operations coordinator of the Community Service Center who was in charge of the Day of Service.
“We could have done a lot of things differently,” Curtis said. “We could have put more money into equipment for sites; we could have put more money to food for sites.”
For the day of service, a group of over 210 participants, including AU staff and AU President Neil Kerwin, traveled to five sites throughout the city, including one site on Minnesota Avenue in Southeast D.C.
Curtis said he believes the Community Service Center did a good job of working around the transportation issues.
“It’s just expensive without AUTO ... It makes us have to focus a little more on how [to] get people from place to place,” Curtis said.
The Community Service Center had only one van to service the five sites, so they hired a bus company to make up for the rest of transportation needs, Curtis said.
SG President Andy MacCracken said the changes to AUTO should have been completed over winter break. MacCracken said he was sorry that the extended downtime of the AUTO program had negative ramifications for groups on campus.
AUTO was offline for an extended time because its vans had to go through maintenance, a process that was out of the SG’s control and a routine that has not been followed “for some time,” according to MacCracken. The vehicles were dropped off over winter break, and some are still in the shop.
“In order to make the long-term changes that needed to be put in place, we [had] to scale back or completely shut down the program for some amount of time, [but] the length of time during which AUTO’s been down unfortunately has taken longer than we’d hoped,” MacCracken said. “I do think that the long-term benefits of that have been substantial.”
You can reach this writer at mfowler@theeagleonline.com.
