By Samantha George

Having spent little over a year as Dean of Students, Annette Diorio will part from the position at the end of this semester and will instead helm the newly created position, Senior Operations Manager. Diorio’s new position will consist of a wide range of responsibilities due to a recent faculty reorganization in Plant Operations and Finance Operations.

Even though her new position appears to be completely different from her current one, Diorio maintains that there are some similarities. “I have supervised professional staff for all of the time I’ve been in higher education, so a lot of this really revolves around staff supervision,” she said.

According to an email sent to the Lafayette College Community on October 14, Diorio will “oversee the College’s Grounds and Custodial departments and its scheduling and event-support functions.” She will report to Director of Plant Operations BruceFerretti.

She will also be in charge of “transportation, shuttles and emergency preparedness,” for which she will be reporting to Vice President of Finance and Administration Mitchell Wein.

According to Wein, the position was created because of the growth of the transportation program and because of parking concerns.

With the expansion of transportation methods, Lafayette is striving to create a centralized management system under which all current and future modes will report to. Currently, there is no singular hub under which all transportation methods are managed.

Members of the community would have to call Public Safety for safety escorts, an outside number for the U-Haul Car Share program and additional departments for other transportation-related issues.

“Other schools have a transportation focus, and as we’ve been seeing, the best practices at other schools … we’ve learned from some of the successes … that they’re centralizing that effort rather than decentralizing, and we think that would work better for us as well,” Wein added.

In terms of parking, Wein said “We want to do it now because parking lately—as we’ve added some parking in some other locations—has become an issue within the community and has become an area we’ve studied as of late.”

Diorio welcomes the change in jobs after 25 years of working in Residence Life and handling conduct issues as Dean of Students.

“The logical progression for somebody who becomes the Dean of Students is to want to be a Vice President. Well, I don’t want to be a Vice President … I just want to do something that’s totally different from what I’ve been doing,” Diorio said.

Some of Diorio’s goals in her new position are to ease communication among members of the community.

I don’t think that we do a great job with communication between the students and the faculty and the staff who receive services from Plant Operations and the folks who deliver those services,” she said. “But I think there’s a really possibility to enhance those communication lines, and that’s partially because I operate on both sides of the fence now, so I think I can help bridge that gap there.”

Vice President for Campus Life and Senior Diversity Officer Celestino Limas will head a selection committee to hire a new Dean of Students.

“The idea would be that we would want to have a new dean start July 1, but be named much sooner,” Limas said. “If things go our way, by early [or] mid-spring, we would have this position named.”

Until then, Associate Dean of Students and Director of Recreation Services Jodie Frey will fill the vacant spot.