UW-Madison’s student-run tutoring service, Greater University Tutoring Service, had its budget for the 2018 fiscal year approved at $141,514.08 by the Student Service Finance Committee Monday.
According to Vivian Burnette, GUTS co-director, GUTS volunteers served around 25,000 hours to tutor more than 4,000 students, both undergraduate and graduate, during the 2016 fiscal year. Among its many goals, the organization’s priorities are to provide free tutorial and academic support assistance and to encourage personal and academic growth.
“Most universities of this size have their own university-led tutoring service. We don’t have that, so what GUTS does is pretty incredible, how much we’re serving a community of this size,” Burnette said.
GUTS offers a variety of programs in order to meet the unique needs of every student. Popular programs include Academic Match, a group tutoring program used primarily by freshmen, and Conversational English, in which students who speak English as a second language are partnered with a native English speaker in order to improve their conversational skills.
GUTS is also looking to expand some of its newer programs, such as Transitions, and its Eagle Heights program, during the upcoming fiscal year.
The organization’s previous fiscal year, however, could negatively impact this budget proposal. According to Burnette, as a result of staff turnover and “miscommunication,” GUTS returned 25 percent of its budget for the 2016 fiscal year.
Within the 25 percent, the largest returns occurred in salaries, which saw a 25.4 percent return, and supplies and programs, with a 27.4 percent return.
In light of these returns, the organization did not request any increases for the 2018 fiscal year. Instead, GUTS is cutting $8,000 from its budget with a 5 percent decrease in salaries and a 25 percent decrease in programming funds.
The organization also took other measures to ensure that this fiscal year would not be a repeat of 2016 by hiring both upper and lowerclassmen, creating new accountability measures to track staff hours and work, and creating a live budget to track expenses.
Burnette hopes that the organization’s funding will be enough for it to be able to continue to serve the UW-Madison community.
“I really do believe that the services that we provide to the students are indispensable. If we were no longer a student org—if we couldn’t provide these services—there’d be a lot of students, particularly freshmen and particularly international students, that would struggle a lot,” Burnette said.
