After losing their Special Status Organization status last year, the Virginia Guides Service — formerly known as the University Guide Service — now provides historical tours of Grounds independent of the University. As they move into a new era of independence, the new Contracted Independent Organization faces numerous changes.
In the fall of 2024, the University Guide Service announced that the University had suspended them from conducting admissions and historical tours following concerns over tour attendance and tour quality. In February of the following year, University leadership terminated the SSO agreement with the Guide Service, citing a lack of participation in the training plan they had organized for Guide Service members.
SSOs are student-run organizations that have special agreements with the University and are authorized to act as representatives of the University. As an SSO, the Guide Service provided admissions and historical tours on behalf of the University. Now the Guide Service has transitioned to a CIO.
According to Nina Accousti, co-chair of the Guide Service and fourth-year Architecture student, the organization continues to promote discussions on the history of the University. To accomplish this, Accousti said that she and her co-chair have focused a lot on the internal structure of the organization.
“A lot of this year has been trying to take our organization through a pause and rethink,” Accousti said. “How can we move forward … and set our goals for the future? That looks like … just trying to reorganize and establish what our missions are now.”
Lydia Schumann, Guide probationary chair for spring 2026 and third-year College student, also said that the organization has been focusing on internal operations, including how best to teach probie members and confidence-building exercises for current members. Guide Service did not recruit new members this semester.
“We’re all trying to come together as an organization to figure out the best ways to modernize the probie class,” Schumann said. “A big [priority] is really emphasizing on historical content and making sure that the people we’re recruiting are interested in history.”
Schumann hopes that through bolstering the organization internally and building a strong foundationary probationary class for the upcoming semester, the Guide Service can smoothly transition into their history-first approach to giving tours.
“We’re focusing on building up a new structure for [our probationary] class … so that next semester … we are teaching in a way that suits the current organization of the Guide Service,” Schumann said.
The Guide Service has been giving historical tours independent from the University since December 2024. It is unclear exactly how many tours they have given since transitioning to a CIO, but Accousti said that they plan to reach the same amount that they had last year, which was over 300 tours. This year, they are also offering specialty tours.
“We’ll get a request like, ‘Hey, this is a group of medical students, any chance someone knows the history of medicine at U.Va.?’” Accousti said. “Then lots of guides can start to research together … and craft more specialty tours.”
Currently, specialty tours listed on the Guides website include “History of African American History,” “History of Women,” “History of Medicine” and more.
Despite resuming their historical tours, financing has remained an issue for the Guides because all the guides are volunteers, and all the tours are free. Accousti said that money is necessary in order to teach trainees and provide them with resources necessary for their extensive training, which includes printed textbook packets, dinner for probies and events.
Schumann emphasized that despite these challenges, the Guide Service still aims to connect with the University community and establish themselves as a historical resource for everyone.
“We’re definitely thinking about how to best integrate ourselves into the University community while also, more practically, taking steps to make sure that we’re doing [the probationary] class really well,” Schumann said.
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