Tired of pulling up the Google browser every time you need to phone Safe Ride?
UO Active Minds is working on a campaign to get campus resource numbers printed on the back of student ID cards.
Active Minds President Juan Rivera said the group is surveying students to see which services they would find most beneficial to have printed on their IDs. The survey will be available for students to fill out until May 30. Rivera said his goal is to have approximately five percent of the school fill out the survey. So far about 100 to 150 people have filled it out.
Active Minds aims to have its campaign approved by the UO Card Office and have the numbers printed on the back of student IDs starting fall 2014, when there will be a new influx of approximate 3,800 new students, according to Rivera. It would be too much to reprint all 25,000 students ID cards.
“A lot of the time (these are) resources that students forget,” Rivera said. “In my case, as a first year student you know about them and you learn about them. As you progress throughout the years, you start forgetting what was originally there.”
Active Minds Administrative Chair Kimia Amirifar says survey findings thus far have found many students want the numbers for UOPD, Health Center, the Counseling Center’s after hours crisis hotline and Safe Ride to be listed on their IDs. @@name verified@@
“Some of these services, the numbers they want to put on the back of ID cards — such as the Health Center — are provided though student fees,” Amirifar said. “It will make it more accessible for people. Because (students) don’t always have the numbers at the top of their heads — maybe their phone isn’t working and they don’t have the number to look at.”
Freshman Ryan Pape says he would like to have Safe Ride and UOPD on the back of his ID card.
“My phone sometimes dies when I’m out at night,” Pape said. “I bring my ID card everywhere. It would be really helpful to have those numbers on my ID.”
Currently Active Minds is working with the UO card office to try to get this idea approved.
According Joel Woodruff, the UO card office manager, printing university resource numbers on the back of student ID cards is not a decision the EMU card office can make alone.
“It would be a university administration decision, not the EMU,” Woodruff said. “It seems to me, the best way to do it would be to do card sleeves. That way things can change, marketing materials can change, there would be more flexibility.”
He said sleeves would be issued with ID cards.
Both Rivera and Amirifar dislike the idea of having the resource numbers being printing on sleeves because it is not a sustainable option and they think most students would end up losing the sleeves.
“If we’re an eco-friendly school, we’re supposedly environmentally friendly,” Amirifar said. “It would make sense to actually print them on the back of the ID cards and not just provide a sleeve that (students) are probably just going to throw away.”