By William Shexnayder
UHCLIDIAN STAFF

A staff shortage and turnover of employees in the Financial Aid and Veterans Affairs Office is the reason student financial aid application files are taking longer than usual to process. Some students, who filed after the May 1 priority deadline or after the Aug. 1 extended deadline, have not been awarded aid. To receive financial aid, a student must submit all required forms and documents by the required deadline. Once his or her file is complete, it must be processed. Financial aid files take two to eight weeks to process. When processing is complete, the student is awarded financial aid. The student must then fill out a loan request form, which is sent to a lender. Approximately two weeks are needed for a loan request to be processed; once processed, students who qualify receivefinancial aid. The normal deadline for UH-Clear Lake applications is May 1. Because of the staff shortage, the deadline was extended to Aug. 1. Next year, the deadline is May 1. The employee shortage came at the busiest time of the school year. ³Normally we have eight full-time staff people, and right now we are down to four,² said Lynda McKendree, the new director of the Financial Aid and Veterans Affairs Office. ³Financial aid files take time to process and because we were short-staffed, we were behind in processing. By the end of September we plan to be pretty much caught up.² Most students who applied before the Aug. 1 extended deadline have been awarded their aid. ³We have all the applications that were completed for Aug. 1 done, but there are some students that are caught because they applied early but there were things missing in their files, or there were mistakes made in their applications that needed to be corrected, so their file wasn¹t complete until after Aug. 8,² said Darlene Biggers, associate vice president for student services and dean of students. Students who applied for financial aid before the Aug. 1 extended deadline, but whose files were not complete had to pay tuition themselves. However, according to the financial aid office, those students will be reimbursed when their files are processed. Students whose files were complete by Aug. 8 were to have been processed by Sept. 12. To ensure that students whose files were complete before Aug. 1 were not dropped, a special hold was placed on their records. According to a Financial Aid and Veterans Affairs Office flyer released at the start of the semester, ³Students whose files were complete by Aug. 1 will not have classes cancelled for non-payment at this time.² ³There was a great deal of coordination and cooperation among the offices to make sure the students did not suffer because of the situation,² said Rose Sklar, registrar and senior associate director in the office of enrollment services. To help students, employees in the financial aid office, the cashiers office and the office of enrollment services are working overtime and on weekends to process applications and get students awarded. ³What you will find from all three offices is that the employees and individuals are very committed, and no one in our offices has what you would consider the 8 to 5 job,² said John F. Smith, executive director of the office of enrollment services. ³Whatever it takes to get the job done; our employees are very dedicated.² In addition to staff overtime, more people are being hired in the financial aid office. McKendree began working at UH-Clear Lake July 16. Her immediate plans include getting the backlog caught up and hiring more staff in the office. University faculty have held meetings recently to identify problems and to discuss ideas that would improve service to students. ³One of the ideas for the future that we have is called Œone stop shop¹ where we cross train individuals so that students can go to one area to get their questions answered,² Smith said. ³As an initial step, the various offices have been meeting: the enrollment services office; the financial aid office; and the cashiers office, so that all the employees recognize what each office is doing and open up those lines of communication so that we can provide better services for the students.² ³We really do sympathize with the students right now and are just trying to do everything we possibly can under the circumstances to try to help them. This is a difficult situation for everybody,² Biggers said. Forms for applying for financial aid for the 2003-2004 school year will be available in January. Students can also apply online.

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