The Red Knight Volunteer Corps recently downsized from over 500 members to roughly 350 members. Anyone can join the club, making it a very popular activity among BSM students, but not many students actively attempt to meet the requirements to maintain their membership. 

When adviser Becca Meagher looked at the sign-ups for RKVC sponsored service events and saw that students were only filling 70% of volunteer slots, she realized that she had to make the tough decision to cut over 150 members from the group. One of the requirements to stay in RKVC is participating in at least two RKVC sponsored events per semester, but Meagher found that almost one-third of all RKVC members hadn’t signed up for any events at all. “I was generous in that because I just went through, and it was people who had done at least one thing stayed. So these 167 people that were released from RKVC had done nothing,” Meagher said.

Members in the past have filled nearly all of the available volunteer slots, making this an atypical occurrence for the group. RKVC has never had a cut of this size, and Meagher has been trying to understand why this might be happening and what she can do to fix it. “I’ve been talking with Ms. [Lisa] Lenhart-Murphy, and we’re not sure why. Is it just that kids are overscheduled? Is it that RKVC became too big?” Meagher said.

There is some concern about what kind of impact the cuts will make on the group, but Meagher has no doubts that she made the right decision. She maintains that the members who were cut wouldn’t have contributed to the group even in the second semester. “Truth be told, I think we got rid of some dead weight,” Meagher said.

Though Meagher is confident in her decision, Katherine Foe, a sophomore who rejoined the club after being mistakenly cut, disagrees with the choice. Foe suggests that the members might have started to volunteer during second semester and thinks that the situation could have been handled differently. “Maybe just have meetings with people that you see really aren’t doing anything… instead of just being like ‘I don’t see anything; kick them out,’ because you don’t know the situation,” Foe said.

Either way, there is no need for students who didn’t meet the requirements to stress; there’s always an opportunity to sign up for RKVC next year. “Everyone has the opportunity to rejoin in the fall… and we’ll start fresh,” Meagher said.