Report cards stalled by post office glitch

Alestle Staff Report

More than 11,000 SIUE students had an extra-long wait before they received their final grades for the fall semester or for any other piece of mail sent from SIUE on Dec. 22.

When SIUE opened Tuesday after the break, the Service Center received more than 400 calls about the missing report cards before noon, according to Assistant Vice Chancellor for Enrollment Management and the Registrar Christa Oxford.

"They were lost by the St. Louis Post Office at the St. Louis Post Office," Oxford said.

According to Edwardsville Postmaster Ken Horton, the lost mail went to the Edwardsville Post Office around 2:30 p.m. Dec. 22. The mail was picked up and sent to the St. Louis Post Office around 6 p.m. After that, the mail was mistakenly stored in a Christmas overflow building in Hazelwood, Mo.

"Someone closed the container up and labeled it empty equipment," Horton said. "After I was made aware of it, we found the letters about 28 hours later." Horton said the St. Louis Post Office normally receives about 1.5 million pieces of mail per day for the metropolitan area and that number may have been double because of the holidays.

Students who were impatient to see their grades could look them up on the Internet Friday, though.

"We were very fortunate that Cougarnet was available," Oxford said. The grade screen on Cougarnet had been accessed more than 11,000 times before the mail was finally recovered in St. Louis.

Oxford said the university had never had such a large problem with lost mail. She said she expects the gone-astray mail to be a rare occurrence.

"We have great faith in the Postal Service and we knew they would find them," she said.