In early August, the Farmville Post Office has ceased delivery services to off-campus apartment complexes managed by Longwood University. Effective immediately, Longwood Village and Lancer Park were no longer included in the Farmville delivery routes.
Printing and Mail Services Director Tim Trent was directly involved in the decision-making process. “I was summoned to the postmaster downtown, and apparently there is a federal regulation that says that the postal employees cannot deliver to a dorm.”
According the Postal Operations Manual (POM), “Whether located on or off campus, and regardless of private ownership, such buildings are nevertheless dormitories and either the school or building owner is responsible for the final delivery of student mail. Post Office personnel do not distribute mail into apartment-type mailboxes for dormitories or residence halls.”
In compliance with United States Postal Service (USPS) regulations, Trent worked directly with Farmville Postmaster Deanna Bryant to establish a system in which university mail staff would assume delivery responsibilities previously held by employees of the Farmville Post Office.
“We send the on-campus distribution van down to pickup, and then they come back, and it’s sorted, and the carriers take it throughout the campus,” Trent explained. “After the drivers come back in, they make a second trip to the post office to pick up the second cage of material and bring it to distribute accordingly.”
The new development led to minor adjustments in operations at the front desks off-campus. The Desk Aide staff, employed by the Office of Residential and Commuter Life (RCL), had to undertake new responsibilities to compensate for the loss of Farmville’s delivery services.
RCL Apartment Manager Courtney Everhart worked with Trent to develop a new plan to process letter mail for off-campus residents. “All our packages were being processed at the front desk previously, so that wasn’t a big change for us; we still do that,” she said. “Because our mailboxes don’t work, we take on the letter mail as well.”
In past years, the Farmville Post Office delivered letter mail directly to assigned mailboxes for resident pickup, which residents could access with room-specific mailbox keys held and assigned by desk staff. “We realized very quickly that since the post office in Farmville was no longer delivering mail to us, our mailboxes out here would become obsolete. So, we made the decision to no longer issue mailbox keys,” said Everhart.
Additionally, Trent and Everhart had to adjust the procedures for outgoing mail, which residents had previously deposited in one of the mailboxes to be collected by a staff member of the Farmville Post Office. The Desk Aide staff are now responsible for receiving outgoing mail and holding onto it until a Mail Services staff member from Longwood arrives to collect it.
“We know when the Desk Aides are going to be staffed, and the post office was making two or three trips in one day,” said Trent. Balancing the work between his office and Everhart’s has proven “more efficient,” he said, because managing the deliveries internally allows for consistent delivery times and pre-sorted mail.
USPS District Communications Coordinator Michele Martel said in an email the change allowed for an adjustment in pickup and delivery times in order to eliminate a recurring issue from the past in which campus distribution vans often collected material from the Farmville Post Office before all of it was sorted. “As a result, student packages were usually left at the Farmville PO overnight because LU did not want to make a second trip,” she wrote.
Although the new system has resolved many previous issues, Everhart acknowledged the “first-year hurdle” her staff will face as RCL adjusts to the additional tasks within the apartment communities. “Tim Trent has a great working relationship with us in the Real Estate Foundation and RCL, so I think that we’ll be able to get through it and just work with the changes,” she said. “The biggest thing is just as things start to not work, we have a plan put in place for how to fix it.”
