Confidential to Kepler - Do not Share or Forward
Dear Students,
Over the past few months, we have continued work on Kepler sustainability practices that started last year. We are working hard to push Kepler closer to its mission of offering high quality education at an affordable price. In recent meetings with the Board, we have received a directive from the Board to manage our budget to just under $3 million USD next year, a change of more than $500,000 USD. This is a community effort. We are making changes across the organization for students and staff in order to reach a more manageable budget. The idea is to make the Kepler education experience more affordable for students and continue growing Kepler. We want to continue increasing access to higher education and be in Rwanda for years to come. These changes can be challenging and they are an investment in your future and the future of Kepler.
To bring our budget to this number, we've been looking at what costs the most money at Kepler. The latest round of work on this involved task force groups of staff members and at least one student to explore several areas of costs that Kepler can reduce.
These task force groups included everything from staffing to the campus building to student housing. The student housing group made a recommendation about reducing housing availability and the SGA requested more time to be spent on this decision. To meet that request, we conducted focus groups with about 19 students on Monday March 13.
From those focus groups, we realized that students were not in support of the recommendation from the task force and wanted more time to come to a collaborative decision and way forward.
Here are the planned next steps:
1. SGA members will take the lead to set up meetings with houses over the next 7-10 days. In those meetings, the SGA members will review where we are on sustainability and engage students in ideas around changes to student housing or other ways to reduce costs. During these meetings students will learn about the costs of student housing and the current challenges. The issues being created in housing are increasing the staff time needed to manage housing and that costs everyone resources and time. We need a way forward that is both conducive to student learning and also manageable for the organization.
2. The SGA will also organize cohort meetings to discuss this more, as needed.
3. SGA will then communicate the feedback and a proposal to students. Students will review the proposal. This will be done in partnership with student representatives and RAs.
4. After any revisions, SGA will submit a proposal to staff.
5. After these meetings, key staff members will take a look through the recommendations and see if we can come to a conclusion that works for Kepler's sustainability and also meets student requests around housing.
We know that there has been distrust in the past around decision making; we are working hard to rebuild that trust through this process and ensure students feel heard. In the end, we have to reduce costs - there is no option here. But we want to work with students to find creative ideas for moving forward. We look forward to your participation in upcoming meetings to try and find a solution that works to meet the budget and student needs.
We’ll aim to have a final update to all of you by mid April, upon return from the break.
