Written By: Lia Armistead 

The VSU IT department is suffering from a lack of staff members, causing slower solutions to technical problems campus wide.

Currently, the IT department employs 42 full-time staff members to monitor over 230 smart classrooms and computer labs on campus, causing glitches to take up to an hour to be fixed.

With a new policy of limiting how many hours a year part-time staff employees can work, ten part-time employees have been promoted to full-time, after the department went through funding challenges difficulties last year.

The department is working on rehiring part-time employees to full-time employees in hopes of increasing the amount of IT workers spread out around campus.

“The only challenge we really have is just staffing,” said IT director, Brian Haugabrook. “Right now with just a handful of people, it’s pretty much impossible to check every single classroom every morning.”

The Human Recourses and Employee Development website has posted ten full-time job opportunities for the IT department.

According to Haugabrook, the department is going to form a technical response unit consisting of five to ten employees, by the end of the semester, after all new staff is trained.

The department will be spread out across campus in separate zones, sometimes with multiple IT technicians, depending on the number computer labs and smart classrooms in the area.

“Our biggest goal is to be proactive with a 15 minute response time,” said Haugabrook.

The Technical Support Unit will go around to each classroom between seven and eight a.m. to make sure that all technology is working properly, starting in the Spring semester.