The Winona State University education department is implementing a new program for education majors called Tevera. It is a lifelong program that would provide students with many benefits, primarily tracking clinical hours and finding placements. However, the catch of all this is that the Tevera program costs over two-hundred dollars.

As a one-time cost, it may not seem like that much at first but when piled on top of tuition and textbook prices, that price starts to look much bigger. That does not even consider the expenses of students majoring in education who must pay for their licensing tests and gas to get to and from the schools they are placed in.

Winona State’s College of Education and Student Senate held a forum about Tevera on Monday, Oct. 24, to explain the situation to students. The main speaker of the event was the Director of the Center for Student Success, Stephanie Bohlman, joined by the interim Dean of the College of Education, Dr. Edward Reilly.

For about an hour and a half, Bohlman spoke about how students would benefit from Tevera. This left only twenty minutes at the end for Reilly to answer questions from students.

One such student was Sierra Schiro, the academic affairs chair on Student Senate and a fourth-year at Winona State majoring in elementary education. Schiro said that before the forum, Student Senate sent out a form for education majors to send in questions they wanted asked during the event.

According to Schiro, their form gathered about one hundred and eighty responses from students. They gathered a list of the most repeated questions and sent it to the College of Education so they could prepare for the event.

“I feel that at first, they only answered seventy-five percent of the questions,” Schiro said, “and we had already narrowed down the […] questions to thirty.”

“It seems like they dodged a lot of the financial questions,” Schiro added.

For many students affected by this, the financial aspect is the most important issue with Tevera. Malorie Olson agreed with this. Olson is a fourth-year at Winona State majoring in social studies education and is the president of Student Senate.

While Olson can attest to the benefits of the program, she does not believe that the price tag attached to it is justified.

“I already see the benefits to it, I just can’t afford it,” Olson stated.

Overall, Olson said that “I personally left [the forum] really frustrated and I think a lot of other students just don’t feel heard on the financial aspect.”

Another problem students seemed to have, was the responses to their questions given by Reilly.

“It’s not very helpful to get questions answered from someone who doesn’t have the answers,” Olson said.

According to Schiro, “For a majority of the time he was looking at the faculty table for […] some way to answer this.”

While Reilly is acting as the current Dean of the College of Education, his appointment is only interim. He has worked in the department of Academic Affairs before, but his PhD is in speech communication, not education.

Most students who attended the forum believe that the College of Education should not have made him answer these questions about Tevera. However, Reilly did apologize for the lack of communication on the university’s part.

Olson and Schiro both agreed that the preferable end goal for education majors in this situation would be to get a reduced price for the program. Another would be for the university to hold another forum for students to be heard.

Regardless, the university was quick in responding to this situation. Currently, it seems unclear what the future of Tevera will mean for students majoring in education.