Learning to Fly - Post 6

Quote of the Day:
"Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant."
- P.T. Barnum

Here's my question for the day: how much is too much?

This week, we had one of our big learning community programs. There are three buildings that house students in our learning community...and the staff of the three buildings work together in order to put on three huge programs each semester. One of the full-time staff members is in charge of each of those.

So the one this month was mine. I was working with one of our grads and she was really excited (excited doesn't even describe it...i mean REALLY REALLY EXCITED!!!) about doing a dive-in movie. She got the RAs on her side, and as the supportive full-time staff member I said yes to their idea. After all, all through training we'd been told to "think big," "don't worry about the cost."

But how do you do a dive-in movie when copyright laws won't allow you to show movies anymore? And how do you make it educational?

It was bit of a struggle, but finally we had an idea and were able to add a positive educational component to the program: Our learning community theme is overall wellness, so we did a PowerPoint presentation complete with movie clips as well as educational information about overall wellness. The RAs picked the movies and came up with the basic slides. I spent countless hours ripping those movie clips off the DVDs and inserting them into the PowerPoint, as well as figuring out the timing of all the effects...sounds pretty easy, but let me tell you...WHAT A HEADACHE! Of course the program I was using didn't really let me cut the movie clips at exactly the moment I wanted them to...or at least not until the second or third try. Let's not even talk about the fact that I had never used that program before and had to teach myself how to use it first. And then the timing of the effects...How long should you leave a slide up? I tried reading through them, but then again, I read very fast. How fast do residents read? Based on their grades, not very fast (ooo, that was mean and not very developmental at all...let's just say I've been doing midterm interventions non-stop for the past few hours because one fourth of my building is failing...most of them not because they don't get the material but because they have decided to waste their rich parents' money and spend their college years drunk at a bar uptown).

Anyway, the PowerPoint presentation actually turned out pretty well (hopefully we can use it for something else as well). But let's talk about renting the pool: It cost $812 for two hours. And we could only get it on the very worst date (that of course fell right during one of the busiest weeks of the semester).

But yeah...$812. Okay, so the program was advertised to 600 students and we were hoping for a turnout of about 150...but $812!?!?!

We (or should I say "I" because in the end most of the committee work fell on me) wrote a funding request for our learning communities fund and we got $500. I also submitted a request to the Residence Hall Association, but the request won't be heard until Monday (already after the program).
About five days prior to the program, I had to face the question whether or not to cancel the program or just keep my fingers crossed and hope that I would get RHA funding. And if not, we could split up the other costs between all the buildings, which would cost everyone $130 (including some extra money that was spent on food).

I decided to go through with the program (after all, we'd already put so much effort and time into it), but asked all the RAs to talk to their residents and let me know how many were coming...and I informed the other full-time staff members that work in buildings of the learning community about the money problems. They were - well, frustrated (to say it in a nice way). I totally understand their frustration...but it didn't really help. I could have needed a little bit support at the time. Last week just wasn't my week (and that's an understatement) and what I really needed was a hug and a "it'll be okay." Or maybe some help on how to deal with this issue...

Oh well, the program happened last night. The RAs, at least the few who responded to my request to check with their residents, all said that between 10-15 residents from their corridors were planning on going. With 24 RAs, that would mean 240-360 residents. Okay, I'm not that naive but expecting 100-150 was reasonable, right? We also did lots of creative advertisements and really tried to spread the word in the buildings (at least I did...not so sure about some of the RAs...).
Yeah...we had maybe 50. Apparently there was some event going on uptown at one of the bars that I hadn't known about (it was a WEDNESDAY night!!!).

So basically, we spent $900 (because we spent a little less than $100 on food and refreshments) on a program for about 50 residents. Yeah, you could argue it was an alcohol-alternative (especially since there was that event going on uptown). It had a solid educational component and I was actually happily surprised about how many residents were watching the PowerPoint presentation).
But was it reallly worth it?

We've had problems with unsafe behavior around the consumption of alcohol this semester (more than usually)...we've had residents complain that there is "nothing to do on campus." Yes, this program addressed that, but still...
Should I have spent all that money?

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?