According to Kate Bruns, communications specialist for the Department of Residence, 35 student workers have been fired and 49 positions have been eliminated. It’s a tough time for everyone on campus, with budget problems taking effect.

So, no big deal, right? Everyone has to make some sacrifices, correct? Yes. But there were several problems with the way the Department of Residence notified the students.

Several student workers claimed that they received no warning about the impending layoffs, and others learned about it through rumors and over the Internet in chat rooms.

In addition to this, many other student workers were told they were going to be laid off, but after the story ran on Monday’s front page, 21 were rehired. “Some people were accidentally sent a letter,” Bruns told the Daily.

So what’s going on with the ISU Department of Residence?

When did they suddenly become inept at communication?

Imagine finding out about losing your job over the Internet. Then, that fear is confirmed when you find a letter informing you of your newfound unemployment sitting on the time clock. No notice. No official letter up front.

The Department of Residence employs a lot of students. For some, it is the only convenient and flexible part-time job that can conform to an already busy schedule. Student workers are not expendable peons. That is the impression the Department of Residence gave when they inappropriately treated these workers as such.

How do you accidentally send 21 people a letter informing them they will be laid off?

One would think the Department of Residence, a beast of a university bureaucracy, would somehow manage to conduct themselves better than this.

It is going to be very hard for the Department of Residence to operate at the same level it once did. By eliminating the student workers, the full-time employees will be forced to pick up the slack as the workload increases.

That is something that happens. Sometimes, budgets are slim and people need to be let go. But students working in the dorms could have been treated with a little more respect, especially when room rates are increasing and many of the student workers live in the dorms themselves.

If only the Department of Residence could have cut corners elsewhere. Students are supposedly their first priority, but those very students were the first to go as times got tough. Dormies have bills to pay just like everybody else.

And if, as the Department of Residence has claimed, this was something that absolutely needed to be done, perhaps they could have gone about the process less half-hearted. The entire situation reflects negatively on them.

editorialboard: Andrea Hauser, Tim Paluch, Michelle Kann, Charlie Weaver, Omar Tesdell