During Tuesday’s Student Assembly senate meeting, eight newly-elected SA members were inducted and the SA Kickstarter Act passed with unanimous consent.
Class of 2019 President Jonah Yesowitz ’19, Sen. Shannon Dutchie ’19, Sen. Alexis Payne ’19, Sen. Brendan Boylan ’19, Sen. Sikander Zakriya ’19, class of 2018 President Laini Boyd ’18, Sen. T.J. Soroka ’17 and Sen. Daniel Sequeira ’17 were inducted into SA after reciting the pledge given to them by a member of the Review Board.
Following inductions, the SA Kickstarter Act returned to the senate floor. Sen. Alaina Shreves ’18, who sponsored the bill, stated that it was tweaked following the discussion during last week’s meeting. The bill was introduced two weeks ago to allocate funding for new student organizations that develop during the academic year. Last week’s senator discussion about the bill centered on whom would decide which organizations would receive funding.
Before the meeting, the bill was amended to reflect more than just financial support of new student organizations.
“We realized that we wanted to create guidelines to focus more on the big ideas instead of the money part of it,” Shreves said. “We’re thinking about creating an ad hoc committee that would make a way for us to allocate the funds and also help with the groups. If they have an idea, they can work directly with us for resources. Also, we’d arrange with the executive finance department … guidelines for the process, so they can decide what the money would be used for.”
The proposed senate ad hoc committee differs from its permanent, standing committees because ad hoc committees meet only when needed. According to Chairman of the Senate Dan Ackerman ’16, examples of precedent for an ad hoc committee are the homecoming ad hoc committees that have occurred for the past three years.
Sen. Eboni Brown ’17 expressed her support for the bill and stressed the importance of not focusing solely on the bill’s financial side.
“I know this bill has changed a lot since its inception since we had difficulty with it last week, but I think that attention is still correct and still making sure that campus-wide ideas that are unique to the campus have some sort of funding, some sort of support,” Brown said. “I feel like we should all really focus on that support piece because it’s so crucial for the implementation of the project ideas.”
Additionally, senators discussed how to ensure that the ad hoc committee was diverse. Suggestions included assigning one member of each permanent committee to the ad hoc committee. To address this concern, Ackerman suggested a friendly amendment to the bill to give the senate chair the ability to assign senators to the committee that will allocate funds.
“Any senator who is interested in participating essentially emails the chair of the senate, and they can participate,” Ackerman said.
The SA Kickstarter Act passed by unanimous consent.
The senate also received updates on past bills during the meeting. According to Sen. Seth Opoku-Yeboah ’16, the shuttles to the College of William and Mary’s women’s soccer game, paid for by the Jill Ellis’ Homecoming Act, transported only five people to the game. Brown informed the senate that the Homecoming t-shirt orders have been placed.
Before the meeting was formally adjourned, SA Vice President Catie Pinkerton ’16 again welcomed newly-inducted SA members.
