Student senators push for change

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By: Zoe Deno

Editor-in-Chief

The Student Senates’ constitution says they are only responsible for regulating clubs, determining activity fee’s and communicating with the students about, “every facet of the College and the broader community.” This year’s Executive Board is striving to go beyond their juristraction to better student life as a whole.

“We can be the voice of the students to people bigger than us,” said student body president, Jamison Jarosz.

The senators are pushing to get class syllabuses attached to wired so that students can see what they are signing up for. This would allow students to see how classes are structured before they enrolled in that class.

“If [students] could see how many tests there would be and how the class was structured it might affect which classes students sign up for,” said Ali Cheema, student body vice president.

Cheema said that last semester he had enrolled in two difficult classes where the tests had consecutively fallen on the same days. If he could have seen the syllabuses he could have enrolled in classes where the tests did not happen on the same day.

According to Cheema, this proposal has gotten a lot of positive feedback. They met with Douglas Baxter, the head of the Academic Senate, who is going to bring it up for discussion at the next meeting.

Cheema, a Muslim, has also been working to get the Islamic Holiday of Eid al-Fitr off from school. While Jarosz says that he does not think observation of the holiday will be implemented this year, The Academic Senate seems very open to the idea.

If Eid al-Fitr is recognized it would be the second religious holiday, after Easter, that the school gives students time off from school to celebrate.

At this point only 5 people sit on The Student Senate, including the four Executive Board members that were elected last semester, Jarosz, Cheema, Treasurer and Trustee Brendan Caluneo and Secretary Maeve Uhald. They welcomed one new senator, John Verdon last week and are hoping to welcome more.

Jarosz said they were short staffed, but is happy with the progress the senate has been making nonetheless. “We were already able to coordinate the delivery of discount movie tickets up to  the Tech-Smart campu in Malta. That has allowed over 100 students to get easy access to the tickets instead of having to drive all the way to Troy to get them.”

The senators have also made their meetings bi-weekly instead of weekly.

“Last year we would have a meeting and the meeting would last maybe 15 minutes, so that was a big problem.We always purchased large platters of food for a 10 minute meeting so cutting that in half was a fiscally smart move,” Jarosz said.

The Senate’s Executive Board still plans on pursuing all of the promises that they made on the campaign trail. “Everything that we ran on is possible. None of them were fake promises at all,” said Cheema.

“Each of our initiatives will need to [get voted through] through a chain [of administrative boards.] If some people don’t like it, it may get blocked from going any higher. If that happens we will do our best to negotiate it through,” he said.

In the 2018 Student Senate Elections, the four executive board members ran as one party. Their promises included, working to lower the cost of vehicle registration and technology fees. They promised to try to work to lower the cost of food on campus and talked about working to implement an additional common hour.

They had also raised the possibility of  having veteran parking and veteran discounts at the bookstore.

Jarosz says they are still working out the logistics of how veteran parking would work. “We really have to make sure we get a lot of support when we do this. [We want this idea to] stick, [we] don’t want to put it up haphazardly and have it just kind of get shrugged off and not have it be implemented.”

Cheema said that the Faculty Student Association had discouraged The Student Senate from trying to implement veterans discounts. He said they thought it would not be fair to non-veteran students.

Another initiative that they had run on was to get a mural painted on the parking garage.  “Based off of our funding right now, we may have to wait until the end of the year because at the end of each year we usually have over 50,000 dollars to work with as a class gift. We don’t have the funds right now,” Jarosz said.