Students will no longer be able to sneak into Tostrud without their Ole cards. On Monday, April 16, the Tostrud desk began requiring students swipe their Ole Card for entry to the fitness center or to attend classes. Recreation Director and Facility Coordinator Judy Tegtmeyer said the new system will help St. Olaf gather better demographic information from gym patrons.
“It’s basically going to help justify the number of people that use the building. And also when we look at budgets, and when we look at justification for student work, that helps to look at the number of people we’re servicing,” Tegtmeyer said.
Previously, Tostrud employees had only counted the number of patrons using the building at any given time. The new demographic information will help improve programming and help the staff reach out to campus populations not being serviced at Tostrud.
“If there’s a certain group on campus that we’re not servicing then we want to be able to reach out to them and figure out why,” Tegtmeyer said.
Eventually all Tostrud patrons will have an ID card for entry, but the rollout is beginning first with students, faculty and staff.
“We’re finding out there’s some kinks in the system so we’re trying to work those out before we have the other group go get their new cards,” Tegtmeyer said.
The system collecting the data has been in the works for quite some time.
“We’re working with a database that we’ve had to transform into something it wasn’t designed to do, versus going out and purchasing expensive software programs that they have for exactly these kinds of centers,” she said. She hopes to have everyone using the system by June 1.
In respect to the recent Facebook data breach, Tegtmeyer wanted to reassure students about the safety of their data.
“We’re not selling their data to any company,” she said.
whitfo1@stolaf.edu
