Bijeta Lamichhane
News Editor
The Student Government Association (SGA) is opening a rental store that enables students to rent various items for a week at no cost. The store, ScotLends, is planning to start offering its service before fall break and will feature items such as hammocks, cooking and baking materials, yoga mats and sleds.
The process of checking items out is quite straightforward. According to SGA’s Chair of Student Service Committee Grace O’Leary ’20, ScotLends will operate every Tuesday from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the SGA office, which is located opposite to Woo91 at the basement of Lowry Center.
“If students bring the items back in the same condition and clean, there will be no charge,” O’Leary said. “When students sign out the items, they provide their name and ID number so that if something does happen, they will be billed directly to their student account.”
O’Leary also informed that students must sign a liability form before taking the items in order to claim responsibility.
Anna Medema ’20 and Jennifer Grossman ’20, co-chairs of student advocacy at SGA, came up with the idea to establish a rental store for students as SGA senators in 2017.
“I came up with this idea in the fall semester of 2017. As a new senator in SGA, I wanted to make an impact and create something I thought students would use and enjoy,” Medema said.
She was inspired by one of her friends’ campus job at University of California, Los Angeles, which involved renting outdoor equipment to students. Medema, however, believed it would be more helpful to provide a variety of items that students would want to use at school but would not use enough to warrant keeping it in their room all year. “Living in a dorm means that space is limited, and there often isn’t enough storage for things such as cooking supplies”, she commented. “The idea behind ScotLends is that the students will be able to fully utilize the resources available to them on campus without having to own and store supplies all year long,” she concluded.
SGA has been planning ScotLends for two years. Last year, as student services chair, O’Leary took Medema and Grossman’s original proposal and tailored it to better suit the Wooster student body. Emilee McCubbins ’20, president of SGA, also shed light on the Student Service Committee’s progress in finally establishing the store.
“The Student Services Committee has been doing a ton of work to try and get a comprehensive set of things that would be useful to the greater campus community,” McCubbins commented. “Preparation has been moving along pretty much as quickly as it can — there is a ton that goes into a project like this, between interest surveys and liability forms and general housekeeping.”
While ScotLends will initially operate one hour a week, SGA is planning to add more hours of operation if the response for the store is positive. They might also add more items as the purchases escalate.
By providing rental services without charge to the student body, SGA aims to make recreational activities more accessible to the College through ScotLends.
“I’m looking forward to SGA being able to provide another service to the campus community that gives students more options to spend their free time in a fun, safe fashion,” McCubbins said.