Steve Schmall, the vice president for finance and administrative services, agreed with President Jim Collins, who was very complimentary of the staff and students in saying how impressed he was with everyone’s willingness to contribute and shift direction on certain initiatives.

“Every department on campus has worked remarkably to see how they can be cost-efficient,” he said.

One of the ways the college goes about being smart about money is by locking in prices for gas ahead of time. For instance, every 10 cents that Loras saves is about $4,500 on the whole after a period of time. There were collaborative efforts by Tom Kruse in Technology and Molly Burrows-Schumacher in Residence Life to ensure that tackling such issues as printers in the residence halls were a team effort geared toward saving money and using each other as resources to get projects accomplished.

“It takes a lot of cross-communication between departments,” said Schmall, but that is exactly the kind of good that can come out of a bad situation, or a bad economy — being thriftier and pooling resources and making for better communication as well.

Steve Schmall says, “I’m kind of lucky; I get to work with them all.” It has really been a group effort of “rearranging responsibilities . . . we’re saving on postage by doing things electronically and not mailing out anymore … we’re modifying our student accounts” in order to respond to students’ desires to be able to access the information at any time as well as not increase costs. The board has said these last two years that they are not going to raise tuition any more than needed and as such is keeping costs as low as possible even though they realize that for some, they are still not low enough. However, the various departments at Loras are doing their best to respond to the changes and the current needs and desires of the students. It sure isn’t an easy process though.