Organizational restructuring, campus-wide events, budget determinations and elections will keep Student Assembly members busy this semester.
To begin, the Code Revision Committee created last semester will continue SA code revisions.
SA President Chase Koontz ’14 said that, in his opinion, SA members’ collaboration and competence made last semester successful.
“A’s don’t come easy, [but] I think we’re right around an A, B+ if you want to add a William and Mary curve to it. … I couldn’t be happier with how the fall semester went and just how well people work together and have so many great ideas and … know how to implement them,” Koontz said.
Following last year’s Kendrick Lamar performance at the end of I Am W&M week (kicking off April 12 this year), Secretary of Diversity Dylan Frendt said that the SA is not pursuing a concert performer this year.
“I am not opposed to there being a concert; however, for me, I think it should be separate,” Frendt said. “We are potentially having a big speaker, we are having the King and Queen’s Ball, a huge dance festival, and potentially a big world fair — it’s a lot of big ticket things in one week.”
Though Frendt could not reveal the speaker, he said the diversity department unanimously supports him or her.
Alongside I Am W&M week programs, the Department of Diversity will continue the Humans of William and Mary project.
Following a successful collaboration with the William and Mary D.C. office to organize a fall break shuttle from Williamsburg to Washington, D.C., SA members and D.C. office staff hope to organize a similar efforts over spring break.
The senate will discuss possibly creating an executive Department of Transportation this month to organize Tribe Rides, airport shuttles and a potential bike share program.
“We have these great ideas and programs, such as Tribe Rides and bus rides home, but once we all graduate, that tends to fall into the hands of the Director of Transportation, Bill Horacio,” sen. Gabriel Morey ’16 said. “We’re also planning this great, big, huge bike infrastructure plan. … We wanted to make sure that as we establish this huge initiative that we wouldn’t be dumping it all onto administration’s plate and that [the] Student Assembly would have involvement and oversight in the process from here on out.”
The beginning of the semester also marks the creation of 2014-15 budget for student organizations and next year’s student activity.
Additionally, Senate Chairman Will McConnell ’14 said he hopes to form an SA Housing Support Administration that will manage and create a website where students and other renters may comment on their landlord experience in a similar way students comment on their teachers on websites like www.ratemyprofessors.com.
“The off-campus housing website right now is like Banner, where you have the information about the class, where it is, what time it is, who’s teaching it,” McConnell said. “That doesn’t tell you anything about [whether] it [is] a good professor, [whether] it [is] a bad professor, other things that may not apply to classes.”
The city of Williamsburg has given the SA access to crime and inspection databases that would provide SA members with data to begin compiling the website before reviews are posted.
After spring break, the Classes of 2015, 2016 and 2017 will elect undergraduate council and senators to represent them in the 2014-15 school year. All students will elect a new president and vice president.
In the transition period that follows the elections, students can dance to band Rare Mixx at the annual King and Queen’s Ball on April 11.
Secretary of Student Life Alyssa Zhu ’14 said she hopes to organize some internal service projects in the SA. Last semester, fourteen SA men raised $1,028 to support the Prostate Cancer Foundation through their No Shave November fundraiser.
SA members hope to release the updated website, a prominent component in election platforms last year, this semester.
