By MANYI ENO

Staff Writer

Have you ever wondered if you were breaking a rule or multiple ones occasion while on campus?

The Student Handbook outlines important policies and changes the administration may have made to those policies and protocols every year.

“All of the policies in the handbook are important,” said Dean of Student Affairs Drew Davis. “I encourage students to read up on the various policies if they have any questions.”

Although the Student Handbook contains important information, it is not handed out to all students before the school year begins.

Davis explained that at the beginning of the semester, only a few copies of the handbook were printed and handed out to freshmen, transfer students and parents.

“There are currently no printed copies of the handbook that students can get a hold of,” he said. “For now, students are referred to the website for accessibility.”

One of the main changes in the handbook this year was the conduct council, which previously was a peer board judicial committee.

Now, faculty and staff have been added to council.

“Students should know that violations of the Handbook or housing contract will begin with a judicial process,” said Davis.

Senior psychology, theater and pre-med major Carmen Savelli was an Orientation Assistant (OA) this semester and also a member of the judicial committee last year.

The night before Welcome Week for the freshmen, Savelli said that the OAs were all assigned different jobs.

Savelli’s job, along with other OAs, was to put a copy of the Student Handbook in the gift baskets the freshmen would receive on move-in day.

“About halfway through [handing them out], we ran out of handbooks, so about half of the freshmen got a handbook and half did not,” Savelli said.

Freshman athletic training major Bethany Pildner was among one of the students who received a handbook and has admitted that she has not yet read it.

“[The administration] only stressed to us that the school is a dry campus,” said Pildner. “They only told us at our second dorm meeting about how there were a lot of incidents last year with people getting in trouble and that’s when they told us about [the judicial process].”

“[The administration] said last year that it was a selected amount of students and that it was a student body without faculty who would bode in what your fate was,” Savelli said about faculty being added to the committee.  “As your peers, [the students of the judicial committee] would be more understanding and accepting, but I think it depletes the whole purpose of the council to have faculty and staff.”

A few policies outlined in the handbook for the 2013-2014 school year are the pet policy, which states that students cannot have a pet with hair, fur or feathers.

Another policy outlines student residence, which states that all intercollegiate athletes are required to live on campus and all other students enrolled at the Demorest campus must reside on campus.

Some exceptions include if students are married, divorced, widowed with dependents or are of the age of 21 on the first day of registration for the fall term.

Students are usually made aware of these policies and others during Freshmen Orientation and Welcome Week.

If students wish to access the handbook online to learn more about the policies mentioned above and others, it takes approximately three clicks to reach it.

First, students should go to piedmont.edu and then click “Current Students” on the left side bar.

Then, students should click the “Student Services” link located on the left side.

On the Student Services page, they should click Student Handbook on the bottom-left.

“[The handbook is] kind of a binding agreement between the institution and the students,” Davis said. “These are our policies; these are what students should adhere to while they are enrolled at Piedmont College.”