By Taylor Dobbs, News Staff

The Department of Housing and Residential Life has reversed its decision to fire seven Resident Assistants (RAs) last month and announced that no other RAs will be fired as a result of a campus-wide audit of RA activity, the office said.

In an email sent to RAs just after 5 p.m. Friday, Director of Residence Life Robert Jose announced that: “Brie [McCormick, Associate Director of Residence Life] and I have met with a representative of the department of Internal Audit. This department will review the Husky swipe data we have collected. This process will take time and likely go beyond the end of the current RA Agreement. As a result, the RA staff who were asked to leave their positions have been reinstated.”

Word of the audit spread quickly among RAs last month after seven members of the staff responsible for the Fairwood Apartments, Light Hall, the YMCA, and  St. Stephen Street properties (also known as the FLYS staff) were fired for not performing their rounds.

Officials performed an audit of the Husky Card swipe records for the members of that staff. Each student’s Husky Card leaves its digital signature when that student is “swiped in” to a residence building. ResLife officials we able to determine, based on a record of RA duty logs and staff members’ swipe records, whether or not RAs had been performing rounds.

When the FLYS audit was complete, seven of the 14 RAs on the staff were fired, and ResLife decided to expand the scope of the audit to all RAs on campus.

In his email, Jose expressed regret for the hostility and frustration the audit and ResLife’s handling of it caused among RAs.

“At our closing event on Tuesday evening, I will speak about our current situation. It has created an environment of doubt, fear and mistrust at many levels. I am deeply saddened by this. I never intended for any of this to occur. I will address all of this directly with the goal of making us whole and redirecting our path.”