As students have been walking through the hallways of the Rollins Center, located at the Bucks County Community College’s Newtown campus, some may have noticed the subtle but impactful changes to the walls.
What once filled the vacant space on the wall of the Rollins hallway were bulletin boards filled with important information about different events, resources and organizations around campus. Now most of those bulletin boards have been removed and are planned to be replaced by electronic screens by the Fall 2023 semester.
Christopher Seifert, the director of Student Engagement and Leadership Development at Bucks, explains how Bucks is attempting to, “modernize things a bit. We are looking into getting screens around campus, starting in Rollins, to test how they work with promoting events.”
The removal of these boards was suggested by Interim Assistant Vice President of Student Affairs, Dr. Rodney Altemose, as an experiment to see how the boards will do with promotion and to lessen “clutter” around campus.
Seifert tells us, “The boards were getting filled with so many flyers that would then get dated and stay up for too long.” The screens’ primary use will be for advertising the activities of student organizations, events happening on campuses and all sports.
But what about the personalized feel that flyers can bring students? For example, the Bucks’ Chess Club has decorated the campus with witty posters encouraging others to join.
Timothy McCloud, a 19-year-old Language and Literature major from Doylestown laughs as he recalls, “I love the Chess Club poster with Kevin Hart in the tub, it honestly makes me wanna play chess. I feel like electronic messaging boards will restrict what students are able to share.”
Another hope for the electronic boards will be “to reduce the amount of paper waste that exists and become a bit more environmentally friendly,” Seifert conveys. Screens taking over papers is a well too known practice that many students of Bucks have faced before due to the COVID-19 pandemic that forced schools to turn fully virtual.
“Organizational-wise, going virtual was really good for me because I used to lose a lot of papers, but other than that I hate looking at and using screens. I’d much rather use paper,” McCloud also tells us.
Staring at screens all day also caused the spread of “screen headaches” among students. According to Healthline, screen headache symptoms are similar to a regular headache with some extra side effects from the screens such as; headache behind the eyes, eye strain, blurry vision, tight neck and shoulder muscles, dry eyes and sensitivity to light.
Will these screens just bring more of a headache to students?
Despite concerns, Seifert assures us that the college does not plan on getting rid of all of the bulletin boards across campus. “These make a bit more sense in Rollins because students gather here and can maybe stay there for an extra few seconds to see what’s coming up, as opposed to walking through Founders rushing to class,” he clarifies.
“Change can be weird at first, but I think we’ll be happy once we get used to life without the bulletin boards in Rollins. And if not, we didn’t throw them out!”