Wednesday, April 20, 2011
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Employees show signs of health, receive payback email. Albrecht said employees at USU-College of Eastern Utah will also receive the same dividend Healthy choices will pay off using their campus’ funds. for active, benefit-eligible USU The employees who are employees in the form of a $600 actively working for the univercheck near the end of this month, sity, enrolled said USU in USU’s health President Stan “I receive weekly einsurance as of Albrecht in an mails from employees July 1, 2010 and April 12 email are eligible for thanking the wellness to employees. benefits, will “We hope staff for their help receive the onethe wellness and encouragement, time wellness dividend, comand telling me they are dividend, said bined with cenvice president tral coverage of changing their health for Business the increase in for the better.” and Finance health insurDave Cowley. ance premiums, – Caroline Shugart, The university will be helpful employee wellness coordinator has approxifor everyone, mately 2,500 particularly employees who in a year when fit this category. across-the-board salary increases “We are able to do this because have not been funded by the state over the current fiscal year, USU’s legislature,” Albrecht states in the By LIS STEWART staff writer
self-insured health plan has experienced lower than expected claims,” Albrecht said in the email. Employee Wellness coordinator Caroline Shugart said she hopes people taking advantage of Wellness programs is connected with the decrease in health care costs at the university. “I receive weekly e-mails from employees thanking the wellness staff for their help and encouragement, and telling me they are changing their health for the better,” she said. Shugart said more and more employees are participating in Wellness programs each year. Visits to the Employee Wellness Center in the HPER building saw a 28 percent increase from 2009 to 2010, according to last year’s fourth-quarter Wellness Program dashboard update.
- See MONEY, page 3
USU FACULTY AND STAFF EXERCISE in the HPER building’s Employee Wellness Center. Various programs have been created to by USU Wellness to encourage employee health. This could lend to the decrease in employee health insurance claims. LAUREN BROTHERSEN photo
Connections novel recounts story of hurricane survivors
Running of the bulls
By RHETT WILKINSON staff writer
Freshman will begin their college experience in the fall through Connections, a program designed to assimilate incoming students to life at USU, by hearing from Chris Rose, a New Orleans TimesPicayune reporter who has both undergone psychotherapy and rehab following an addiction to painkillers. He will visit USU Aug. 27 to speak about Dave Eggers’ novel “Zeitoun” at 9:30 a.m. in the Kent Concert Hall. The novel chronicles the emotional exodus of Hurricane Katrina survivors Kathy and Abdulrahman Zeitoun. Abdulrahman began to explore the city in New Orleans in a secondhand canoe following the calamity, distributing what supplies he had and ferrying neighbors to higher ground. Tuesday, Rose was contracted to be the welcome-to-school-week’s speaker following the downfall of Student Orientation Advising and Registration (SOAR) Director Noelle Call’s original plan to welcome either Hurricane Katrina survivor Kathy Zeitoun or author David Eggers. Rose said he will seek to inspire the newest Aggies by shedding light on the novel’s significance. Rose was a 2006 Pulitzer Prize finalist for Distinguished
THE RED BULL CHARIOT RACE prompted students to line up on 800 East and cheer on fellow students as they raced toward the finish line at the 700 North intersection. The chariot race winner was the Student Alumni Association. For more pictures of Monday’s event visit Utahstatesman.com. KYLE PETT photos
Inside This Issue
4/20/11 Students walk, ride bikes or take the bus to school to help the environment and save money. Page 6
Aggie football completes final scrimmage of spring season. Page 9
Commentary of the catastrophe and was a part of the Times-Picayune team that won the 2006 Public Service Pulitzer for the newspaper’s Katrina coverage. He said an additional objective of his visit is to recount the catastrophic events which changed the lives of hundreds of thousands. “I carry a message of resilience, of community, of pride of place, and of extreme optimism in the face of lost hope,” said Rose, who also wrote a book of collected Katrina columns called ‘1 Dead in Attic,’ a compilation of life in New Orleans following the hurricane. “What New Orleans did to rebuild itself in the near absence of hope, what New Orleans and the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who have come to to help rebuild is a tremendous story of the triumph of the human spirit,” he said. Such spirit is captured in a novel that hones in on the Zeitoun’s plight, Rose said. “In one personal story, we see exactly a perfect example of what I’m talking about,” Rose said of “Zeitoun.” “It exists totally in a book about someone who was self-
- See ‘ZEITOUN’, page 3
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