The Student Involvement Suite at the Stamp Student Union was redesigned to bring in more staff members and resources. (Su Hong/The Diamondback)

After displacing 26 student groups from Stamp last spring, officials are working to make the best use of the renovated Student Involvement Suite.

The groups’ old office spaces in Stamp Student Union now house the Student Organization Resource Center to help groups with event planning, managing group bank accounts and advising, a change many student leaders said is not worth the price. As most of the groups that had headquarters in the suite scramble to find space to meet and store supplies, Stamp Director Marsha Guenzler-Stevens said the student union will continue to focus on ways to lend support to as many student organizations as possible.

Guenzler-Stevens added that creating the resource center is part of a larger plan to make the suite more useful to the university community.

“When this building was reopened 10 years ago, it was designed for 300 groups — there are 843 groups now,” Guenzler-Stevens said. “We won’t be able to satisfy anywhere near that many groups, but should we be tearing down the walls, should we be having cubicles, sofas, movable furniture? What should it look like?”

There are no concrete solutions yet, but a task force of students, faculty and staff has assembled to come up with possible solutions, including helping student groups find extra storage elsewhere on the campus and negotiate the use of meeting spaces in other academic buildings, Guenzler-Stevens said. Members of the task force expect to hold their first meeting this month.

“We’ve discovered that there is this push-pull,” Guenzler-Stevens said. “There is a desire on the part of student groups to have easily accessible resources, so part of the relocation … was to really think about how to provide rich advising right in the student organization suite. At the same time, that takes up some of the physical space.”

But members of displaced groups said losing their space in the suite will be a harmful blow to their organizations.

“In my opinion, they should have found another option that would add the resource center space without removing offices,” Godly Jack, a senior biochemistry major and treasurer of the Charles R. Drew Pre-Med Society, wrote in an email.

After Stamp’s office allocations committee announced that fewer student groups would receive office space in May, a majority of the 26 rejected groups appealed the decision. Almost all of the groups were denied space, and seven of them, including the CRD Pre-Med Society, are expected to present their cases at a hearing on Thursday.

The Filipino Cultural Association accidentally missed the deadline to submit an appeal by a few hours, said group President Andrew Aggabao.

Its members filed a second appeal over the summer with the Stamp Advisory Board, but again were denied space.

Guenzler-Stevens previously told The Diamondback some of the space alloted to the resource center could potentially be returned for student use. After the reallocation, however, only one office space was left over, and it was assigned to the University System of Maryland student regent.

“Part of what we’ll look at is if we have any options, like the option of squeezing an additional group into an office where we have two groups there, but maybe we could get three,” Guenzler-Stevens said. “The other is to help folks identify what it is they need.”

Aggabao said FCA members thought they deserved the office space, but the group does not plan on appealing again.

“We knew they weren’t trying to be mean and kick us out,” he added. “It’s not paramount to the success of our organization, but it really did help and we wanted to make sure our voice was heard.”

FCA has managed to continue operating by moving its supplies to the homes of several local members, while the group searches for an alternative meeting place.

“It’s water under the bridge now,” Aggabao said. “After meeting with them, we understood how difficult it was, and really what we’re dealing with is a space that is not nearly large enough, at all, to accommodate all the students who need to use it.”

blasey@umdbk.com