Breanna Kingery/Coursework

Not all classified staff are losing their jobs, but some are being asked to take drastic salary cuts in order to keep their positions

By Breanna Kingery

Previous budget cuts to the University of Nevada, Reno have made a great impact on campus.  On March 7, an additional $26 million annual budget reduction was proposed.

“The proposed budget reductions announced today dramatically reduce the quality of the University’s core instructional and research capabilities,” UNR President Milton Glick stated in a letter to the campus community. “They eliminate or severely curtail key service functions in ways that will impact our student body for years to come. … Sadly, faculty and staff positions will be lost and the lives of hundreds of individuals on our campus will be painfully impacted.”

If the proposed cuts are implemented, there will be eliminations of majors and minors as well as significant downsizing of numerous programs and elimination of all state funding for other valuable campus resources.  The aforementioned cuts represent a significant impact to the university, and they are only a small sample of those proposed.

In a question and answer session with the Reno Gazette-Journal University Provost Marc Johnson addressed some of many concerns about the proposed budget cuts.

“We have identified some programs that are to be downsized or closed because the first round of budget-reduction plans,” Johnson said. “Those are always controversial on campus, emotional, and the decision process is continuing.”

Each program or college up for elimination is given the chance to defend themselves and come up with alternatives to the proposal.  One department seeing cuts is the advising center for undecided students.

Gabrielle Blaustein is the administrative assistant in the advising center. Blaustein has worked for the university for 15 years, and has spent the past nine years working as the only administrative assistant in her department.

“Gabby is the only reason I am still in school today,” Hudson Stremmel, a sophomore at the university said.  “Before I walked into the advising center, I was ready to drop out.”

Many of Blaustein’s students, including Stremmel, keep in contact with her on a regular basis.

“Gabby told me to just hang in there and keep trying to get through,” Stremmel said. “She has been so nice and I would be sad to see her leave.”

The advising center has a combined student load of 1,800 to 2,000 students at a given time.  According to Blaustein, this number may be similar to that of which entire colleges may see, but not a single department.  In general, most departments within colleges retain a couple hundred of students at a time.

“What I love about my job is that the majority of it isn’t what you would think of as typical administrative work,” Blaustein said. “The bulk of my job is student contact; scheduling appointments, doing what my boss calls ‘para-advising,’ which is answering questions about policy and procedures and helping students register for classes.”

Blaustein started at UNR as a full-time transfer student and worked as a student employee.  After a couple years, she took a position as a classified administrative employee and was not able to finish her biology degree.

“Having the classified position was nice after struggling on student financial aid for two years,” Blaustein said. “Although, funnily enough, I’m trying to decide whether this is all coming full-circle and whether I can just afford to be a full-time student again.”

Although Blaustein’s position is not being eliminated completely, she was told that it would be going from a full-time position to a half-time position, resulting in a 50 percent pay cut.  She was given the opportunity to decide if she would accept or decline this offer and denied it.  Cuts to similar classified positions would be trimming $44,322 off of the budget.  That’s only .002 percent of the total cuts.

“One of the important things I wanted to know was if it was going to half-time with or without benefits,” Blaustein said. “They told me I would be able to keep the benefits, but in the end the hours I would be required to work wouldn’t allow me to [ideally] find another job on campus or even become a part-time student again.”

According to the university’s proposed budget plan, Blaustein is one of 130 employees facing these difficult circumstances.  Confronted with this choice, Blaustein said that if she were to leave the university, she would most likely leave the state of Nevada altogether.