Beak ‘Em Bucks, a debit card feature on KU IDs, may violate Kansas law because the University makes no attempt to return money in inactive accounts to former students, nor does it turn over abandoned accounts to the Kansas State Treasurer.

KU officials say they don’t know how much of the almost $300,000 in Beak ‘Em Bucks accounts is abandoned or even which accounts are active.

The University maintains account information in its databases, but KU officials denied a Kansas Open Records Act request for information about abandoned accounts by the University Daily Kansan. Jane Rosenthal, KU privacy officer and records custodian, said the request was denied because “the development of special programming would be required to produce this information.”

Student Senator Mike Wellems, chair of Senate’s finance committee, said, “It seems like the University would want to get this information just to have a better understanding of the problem.”

Peggy Hanna, deputy assistant to the Kansas State Treasurer, said the Kansas Unclaimed Property Act required state agencies, including the University, to report abandoned funds to her office.

"We're just trying to stay under the radar,” explained Lindy Eakin, vice provost for administration and finance. “It [the Unclaimed Property Act] just introduces so much bureaucratic complexity. It's one of those things where we know who the students are and we know what's in their account. It's easy for us to get them their money."

Beak ‘Em Bucks by the numbers

Beak ‘Em Bucks allows students and staff to make purchases on- and off-campus using their KU ID cards. It’s part of the process to produce a “one-card” system for multiple functions. The card currently is used for on-campus meal plans, library services, Beak ‘Em Bucks, as a photo ID, and can be linked to a Commerce Bank checking account.

As of late October, almost $300,000 sat in the Commerce Bank account that stores Beak ‘Em Bucks funds. The University manages and tracks the individual accounts. That figure also includes $10,000 in interest accumulated since the program began. The University keeps earned interest. While some of the balance belongs to current students who are spending that money each day, account activity during the two-year period from July 2004 to June 2006 showed a $200,000 difference between deposits and spending. During that time, more than $1.3 million was deposited while only $1.1 million was spent. Accounts that have not had deposits or withdrawals for 12 months are considered inactive by the University.

When the University expanded the program to off-campus businesses, deposits nearly doubled from the 2004-05 school year to the 2005-06 year.

The program now includes 25 off-campus merchants, with several being added this semester. Matt Bogner, a spokesman for Off-Campus Advantage which handles off-campus transactions and expansion for Beak ‘Em Bucks, said the program had already exceeded the average of 20 off-campus locations for a program like this. Off Campus Advantage recently changed its name from SA Cash.

The Unclaimed Property Act

The Kansas Unclaimed Property Act requires businesses or government agencies to turn over abandoned property to the Kansas State treasurer’s office. That office then holds the property so owners or heirs can claim what is rightfully theirs. Property can include cash, bank accounts, stocks, bonds, royalties, the contents of safe deposit boxes and other personal holdings. The state treasurer’s office maintains a searchable, online database people may use to find forgotten or lost money. Currently, the University doesn’t report any funds from Beak ‘Em Bucks to the state treasurer.

Under the law, property held by the government is considered abandoned after one year of inactivity or lack of contact from the rightful owner. Beak ‘Em Bucks started in 2003.

Eakin said the program did not fall under the Unclaimed Property Act because the system is like a prepaid service. He compared it to campus meal plans where students pay for a certain number of meals at the start of the year even if they don’t eat that many meals during the year.

However, Beak ‘Em Bucks can now be used at more than two dozen locations off campus, including restaurants, gas stations, a tanning salon and a textbook store.
Hanna, the deputy assistant treasurer, said inactive cash accounts are not like prepaid services and should be reported.

“This is the student's money - they just access it through a card,” she said in an e-mail interview. “The university is splitting hairs at the expense of the students.”
Eakins said the University did not want to look or act like a bank. “That opens up a whole Pandora’s box of regulation and oversight that we don’t want to get into,” he said.

As the program grows, Eakin said the University should look at ways to contact students about their accounts. He noted that bringing a bookstore into the system had increased the likelihood of students putting larger sums into their accounts.

Wellems, the student senator, said it sounded like a bank account.

“You can deposit money, you can spend money, you can request a refund,” he said. “You’re not paying for a service; you’re putting your money in a convenient form.”

Nancy Miles, director of the KU Card Center, said the University made no attempt to contact students who may have money in inactive accounts and had no plans to do so in the future. Students can check their balance and transaction history through the Kyou student portal, she said.

Hanna said that just letting the accounts sit there with no activity after 12 months is unacceptable under the law.

David Kidd, manager of the card center at Wichita State University, said that in his 10 years working in this area, he couldn’t remember anyone ever bringing up the issue of unclaimed property laws, either inside his school or from other institutions.

WSU uses a system that links student cards to Commerce Bank accounts in students’ names. Hanna said when cards linked directly to a bank account in the student’s name, compliance with the Unclaimed Property Act would fall on the bank, not the university. KU also allows students to link their card to a Commerce Bank account, though that function is separate from Beak ‘Em Bucks accounts.

Who owes whom?

The University may not know how much money sits in abandoned accounts, but it does know how much money students owe to the University and can use Beak ‘Em Bucks accounts to get that money.

To close a Beak ‘Em Bucks account, the University charges a $15 fee to receive a refund (PDF form). It then subtracts any tuition or fees owed to the University from any refund, according to terms listed on the KU Card Center’s Web site. Refunds may be requested only in the spring semester or when students are leaving school.

The card center had processed 119 refund requests since the beginning of the program through early this semester.

The system also can disable the card, and the Beak ‘Em Bucks account, of any student who is not enrolled at the University. Only active students and staff can access their Beak ‘Em Bucks account. Miles said this was an automated process within the University’s databases and could not be used to identify inactive accounts.

The terms also allow the University to charge a $10 maintenance fee to accounts after they have been inactive for one year, although Miles said that fee wasn’t yet being charged. The database system that maintains all the accounts doesn’t have the ability to assess the fee yet, but the University plans to update the system to charge the fee, she said. Once they have the ability to charge the maintenance fee, they should be able to also identify inactive accounts, she said.

Jude Braun, Chicago freshman, said that she liked the convenience of Beak ‘Em Bucks, but that the fees sounded like another way to nickel and dime students.
“I think we pay enough in every single other way,” she said.

Revenues and costs

The University also knows how much revenue it earns from the card system.

The largest revenue comes from Commerce Bank. As part of the contract that allows checking accounts to be linked to KU cards, Commerce guarantees a revenue stream to the school.

That revenue comes from a plan that involves bank accounts held by faculty, staff and students. For accounts created at the on-campus Commerce branch and accounts through a benefits package offered by Commerce to KU staff, the University gets 0.2 percent of purchases made with debit cards linked to those accounts. The University also collects 0.08 percent of debit card purchases made through KU Checking accounts maintained off campus.

Since the inception of the program, the University has collected more than $130,000 from this revenue sharing. Commerce also made an up-front payment of $105,000 to the University and included $50,000 worth of blank identification cards.

Off-Campus Advantage (OCA), which handles off-campus transactions, also pays a kind of revenue sharing to the University. OCA charges a transaction fee to businesses that take Beak ‘Em Bucks. Bogner declined to give the amount of the average transaction fee. The University collects 70 percent of that fee while OCA keeps 30 percent. Since Beak ‘Em Bucks went off campus last November, students have spent more than $114,000 off campus and the University has collected just over $6,000 from those transactions as of August of this year.

Those figures include revenue from Dominos Pizza, which has a direct contract with the University to take Beak ‘Em Bucks for on-campus pizza delivery.

The program has collected total revenues of more than $250,000.

Eakin said Beak ‘Em Bucks hasn’t paid for itself yet. He said judging from other universities’ experiences, as the program grew it should be able to do a little better than break even, allowing the University to offer the service without having to pay for it.
The one-card program has cost at least $700,000 to start and maintain. That includes the original equipment costs, card readers, fees, training and software.

Posted by Courtney Farr at 9:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While the number of diaper services plummeted over the last two decades, one Lawrence couple says their service, while small, is going well.

Amber and Jeremy Lehrman said they first looked for a cloth diaper washing and delivery service to use. When they couldn’t find one, they started their own, Express Diapers, last year.

“People that want to do something that’s environmentally friendly and healthy for their child, but don’t want to wash diapers, love the service,” Amber said.

The industry has moved away from large services that can serve thousands to smaller, home-based businesses that may only have a few dozen customers, said Jack Shiffert of the National Association of Diaper Services.

Express Diapers serves about 10 customers and has two or three more on the way, said Amber. They could serve 25 without needing to expand.

In the 1980s, the diaper association had more 300 members, Shiffert said. Now it has only 20. He said there may be a hundred services in the country, but the smaller ones are hard to find and track.

“I spend half my time telling people there are no diaper services in their city,” he said.

Do-It-Yourself Diapering

While diaper services have shrunk in size and numbers, the variety and choice available to parents willing to wash their own has exploded.

“It’s the Internet that has really aided the resurgence in cloth diapering,” said Harold Agnew, owner of clothdaddy.com. He runs the Web site from his home in Lawrence, which lets him stay at home with his two children. He sells cloth diapers and accessories.

On hundreds of Web sites, parents can find cloth diapers ranging from factory produced diapers to hand-made ones that cross into art.

Agnew said some cloth diaper users had turned a mundane chore into a competitive collection. They seek out unique, rare and custom made diapers. They’re called “diaper hyenas" (scroll down for full definition) because they swarm Web sites, buying out the newest design, he said.

“I’ve heard of people with 80 diapers or more,” he said.

Agnew sells two types of diapers and periodically makes custom absorbent inserts for them.

A prefold diaper, similar in size to a dish cloth, is the less expensive option. Most services use them, including Express Diapers. The cloth diaper fits into a cover that holds in leaks. The cover uses Velcro or snaps to keep it on a baby. The diapers cost $18 to $30 per dozen plus $8 to $10 per cover. Covers can be used several times before washing, so fewer are needed.

Agnew also sells pocket diapers. These diapers include a cover with a fleece liner sewn into them. The liner creates a pocket that holds inserts that increases absorbency.

His pocket diapers cost $17.95 per diaper and insert combo, but he said many customers felt they were easier to use.

The cost comparison

For most parents with one child in diapers, a diaper service would cost about $60 or $70 a month, an average of about 25 cents per diaper change.

For disposables, costs can range from 16 cents to more than 30 cents per diaper depending on brand, style and size. Disposables don’t always need changed as often because chemical absorbers let babies go longer between changes. At an average of 24 cents per diaper, disposables would cost between $50 and $60 per month.

For the first two years of diapering, disposables would cost around $1,400 while Express Diapers would cost about $1,300 to $1,700. Washing their own diapers, parents might spend as little as $150 for prefolds and covers or up to $650 for pocket diapers. If parents used cloth all the time, a baby would need 18 to 36 diapers depending on how often a parent washes laundry.

Agnew said he suggest parents buy a small number of cloth diapers to discover if they will like them before spending very much money.

‘We live in a disposable world’

Terry and Lesa Erisman started as customers of Express Diapers this spring. Shortley thereafter, Terry started helping them design their Web site too. He said it made sense to help out a company whose service he believed in.

Terry and Lesa said environmental and health concerns made them interested in cloth diapers for their daughter, Anna. More than 3.4 million tons of disposable diapers were thrown away in 2001, according to Environmental Protection Agency estimates.

The Erismans said they also use disposables at times for convenience. On vacation or when their daughter is staying with grandparents, they said it was easier to use disposables. Then they don’t have to worry about storing soiled diapers.

Lesa said she saw a difference in diaper rash between using disposables and cloth diapers.

“She’ll get really red, really quickly” in disposables, she said. “We don’t have any of those issues when she’s in cloth.”

Terry Erisman said it’s hard to completely do without disposables.

“We live in a disposable world,” he said.

Posted by Courtney Farr at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A computer program could help kids with chronic headaches say researchers in pediatric pain management.

The program, Headstrong, educates children 7 to 12 years old about headaches, teaches them relaxation techniques and introduces them to helpful coping strategies to deal with their pain.

“If you can give kids information, that makes them feel empowered,” said Mark Connelly, co-director of integrative pain management at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. “Just that feeling can have a very real effect on the body.”

Connelly designed the original Headstrong program for his doctoral dissertation at the University of Kansas Medical Center under Michael Rapoff, division chief of behavioral pediatrics at the Med Center. The program has since been refined and modified based in part on feedback from kids who have used it, Rapoff said.

Rapoff continues to study the usefulness of the program. In a pilot study, published in August in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 53 percent of children using the program showed clinically significant improvement.

That study examined the effects of Headstrong for three months. Now, Rapoff is conducting another study to look at longer term benefits, he said. The pilot study also compared the results of Headstrong kids against a control group that used no computer program. In the current study, the control group receives the same educational material as kids using Headstrong, but not the relaxation training. Connelly said this is to find if educating kids about their headaches provides a benefit.

Children use the program for four weeks, progressing through a series of lessons. Week one educates children about headaches. Children are introduced to the four parts of the pain puzzle: injury, feelings, thoughts and behaviors. Each can contribute to pain and how it is managed.

During week two, they are led through a series of relaxation techniques.

First is deep breathing: Breathe in slowly…2…3, now out…2…3.

Next, imagery: Imagine yourself in calm, peaceful place, like a beach or forest. What do you hear? What do you see?

Finally, muscle relaxation: Tense and then relax your muscles. Pretend you are a cat, stretching its legs out in front of it.

During week three, children learn about how to use positive thinking and problem solving techniques to reduce their headaches. Week four examines behaviors which can help, or worsen, headaches.

Some of the information might sound familiar, and should. The pain management techniques in the program are widely accepted and used in psychology, Connelly said. There is nothing cutting edge about the information delivered.

The difference is in how kids learn it. Where traditionally a child would attend a number of sessions with a psychologist, now the same information can be delivered in their home with them in control of how and when they learn it.

Connelly said that the results from the pilot study with Headstrong matched up very closely to the success rates when children are taught these techniques by a psychologist.

“For the most part, kids are better at most of that stuff than adults,” he said. “Adults can get more cynical about it, thinking it’s ‘new agey.’”

Rapoff said he estimated a normal cost of $1,500 to $2,000 for a child to traditionally learn the techniques in the program. The program is currently distributed by CD, but Rapoff would like to see it freely available on the internet, he said. Even kids without computers could benefit by using it on a school computer, he said.

“The advantage is that the children don’t have to come in and see a therapist and pay for it,” said Rapoff. “My hope for this is that it is readily available, with all the legal and medical caveats.”

He said one concern about hosting the program for free on the internet was that it couldn’t substitute a medical diagnosis or treatment. If headaches are being caused by a physical condition, like a brain tumor, then kids need to see a neurologist, he said. All of the children who have used Headstrong have been seen by a neurologist and had problems like tumors ruled out, Rapoff said. For those using the program, medication just doesn't do enough to manage their pain. Headstrong isn't a replacement to other therapy, though, it is another tool to use to treat pain, he said.

The possible financial benefits could extend beyond psychologist visits, however. Fewer headaches can mean fewer doctor visits and less reliance on pain medication, Connelly said. Parents would have to miss fewer days of work to care for their child.

Rapoff said they are also working on expanding the concept beyond just headaches. They also are working on Gutstrong for children with chronic abdominal pain and Jointstrong for children with arthritis. The idea can be extended to many chronic pain issues, he said. The current study ends late next summer, after which they will be able to consider how to distribute it.

Posted by Courtney Farr at 2:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)