After orchestrating the supervision of social events on campus for the past six years, the Party Associate (PA) program will receive a complete overhaul, the college announced in an email from Student Activities Coordinator Mike Elias, last Tuesday. PAs will be replaced by members of SwatTeam, a new student group composed of members of the Drug and Alcohol Resource Team (DART), the Sexual Misconduct and Resource Team (SMART), the Acquaintance Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP) advisors, former PAs and anyone else interested in joining.
In the past, parties at the college have been managed by two to three PAs some who work at the door and others who work inside the party. Their responsibilities included checking Tri-Co IDs, issuing wristbands to guests over 21, and acting as a resource to address any safety issues within the party. SwatTeam intends to expand upon these PA functions to create a larger and more comprehensive party management program.
“This is an effort to pull student resources from various groups in order to maximize effectiveness,” explained Elias. “The changes were made after a partnership developed between the Student Activities Office and Student Council to address issues of party safety, at which point we worked collaboratively with the PAs and PA coordinators to develop a program.”
Since the start of the fall semester, Elias has been working alongside PA Coordinators Paul Cato ’14 and Alejandra Barajas ’15 as well as members of SMART, DART, and ASAP to design the SwatTeam program. Seeking to improve upon the service of PAs in previous years, the SwatTeam organizers began their proposal by addressing the limitations of the PA program.
“In the past, too many responsibilities were put on too few people,” Cato said. “If you have two people working in the front, they can’t check on what’s going on inside the party.”
To remedy this dearth of PAs, there will now be more SwatTeam members at every party who will be better trained to do more specific jobs. The traditional responsibilities will now be augmented with the introduction of escorts to walk home students who request accompaniment – and barkeeps to oversee the mixing and distribution of drinks. Additionally, SwatTeam members will go through increased training to include bystander intervention and more comprehensive alcohol safety methods.
“This larger program will empower Swarthmore students to take responsibility for the safety of their parties,” Elias said.
Cato agreed. “Technically, Public Safety could be doing all of this stuff, but students don’t want that,” he said. “It’s much less intimidating to walk into a party where students are in charge.”
But despite the intentions of the organizers to create a more positive party experience, some students at the college have reservations.
“My big concern with the system is that it now requires something like seven PAs for one of our parties,” said Matt Bertuch’14. “I would love to have seven PAs, the more the merrier, but the PA coordinators had a tough time getting one or two PAs for us last semester. I can’t see them getting seven per party.”
David Hill ’13, who served as the head of the PA program last year, expressed concern about the same issue. “There is a manpower problem. When I served as coordinator, I recruited heavily and frequently,” he said. “Even then, it was incredibly difficult to fully staff parties, when each party only had two to three PAs. I have no earthly idea how they will make up this gap, given the doubling of requirements.”
Hill also criticized the SwatTeam’s expansion of duties, suggesting that the use of underage SwatTeam members as barkeeps and escorts might be a liability. Hill argued that since most PAs are freshmen and sophomores, having them oversee the distribution of alcohol and take charge of intoxicated and potentially underage individuals would be putting them legally at risk.
The SwatTeam application describes the responsibilities of the barkeep position as “assisting the host who is tending the serving station, serving only one drink at a time (per person), and checking to make sure that guests receiving alcoholic drinks are wearing a wristband identifying them as 21 and over.” According to Elias, this is an important component of the greater SwatTeam agenda to better regulate alcohol safety at the college.
Aside from issues of legality and strictness, concern was also raised over the heightened cost of hosting parties at the college. According to Elias’s email, the pay for SwatTeam members will be increased to $55 per party. With more SwatTeam members required at each party, the costs of the SwatTeam program will be greater than that of the PAs.
“Each party will require, at minimum, five PAs under the standards they’ve put forth. This means $275 per party,” Hill said. “If my recollection serves, we averaged two to three parties per weekend, plus Pub Nite. This means a weekly cost of almost $1,000. Under the previous system, the per party cost was frequently under $100.”
How will this all of these changes affect parties at the college?
Cato said the possibility of any drastic changes in the dynamics of the college’s party scene are slim. “The main thing students need to realize is that the climate of parties isn’t really going to change,” he said.
The SwatTeam program is set to begin this Saturday as numerous applications for the organization have been received throughout the week. This will be the first opportunity for both administrators and the student body to see how the new program will impact the college’s social scene.
