Card readers meant to ensure that students – not faculty and staff – have access to the free newspapers on the campus will arrive as early as this semester, SGA officials said.

USA Today, not students, will pick up the $12,000 tab, Student Government Association officials added.

Students have complained that they arrive on the campus at 8 a.m. and the newspapers are already gone, leading them to believe professors and other university workers hoard the majority of the newspapers. The complaints inspired the SGA to install card readers in every program location, effectively locking up the free editions of The Washington Post, The New York Times and USA Today from staff, said SGA president Emma Simson.

USA Today offered to foot the bill because it sponsors the Collegiate Readership Program, which brought the newspapers to the campus along with the SGA. But it might take until early 2007 to install all the card readers.

Instead of simply picking up the papers from the mesh carts in Van Munching Hall, McKeldin Library, Tydings Hall and the physics building, students will now swipe their ID card through a reader similar to those located outside dorms. Once the card reader has verified the newspaper recipient’s undergraduate or graduate status, the student can then open the holding apparatus and pick up the paper.

Because the program is funded by both student activity fees and USA Today, the SGA was concerned when, after a survey about the program last fall, it learned many students were unable to receive papers because university faculty and staff had taken them earlier in the morning, Simson said.

But because student support for the program was high – a 98 percent approval rating among survey participants, according to Simson – the SGA decided to continue another year of the program. Because the program was so popular with students, USA Today suggested the card readers, which they have already installed in some of the other nearly 400 schools part of the Collegiate Readership Program.

“They assess the program after a year, and then if students and the school like it, they talk about making improvements to the program,” Simson said. “USA Today actually absorbs the cost of card readers – $3,000 each. It’s not passed down to students in any way.”

One of the SGA’s major concerns was the possibility that the card readers would collect student information, Simson said. However, USA Today is going to have discussions with officials in charge of the registrar’s and student information offices to make sure the program meshes with the university’s coding system, she said.

Newspapers will be delivered in the coming week, and Simson hopes the program will be as successful as it was last year, she said.

“The card readers really are not about locking up papers or anything like that,” she said. “It’s really more saying, ‘This is a service we want to provide, and improve upon it, and make it look nice and have the logos on it to show that it’s connected to the university and a pride to the university.”

Contact reporter Roxana Hadadi at roxanadbk@gmail.com.