Student Senate passed its first resolution of the year and proposed others at Monday’s General Assembly meeting.
The first resolution was related to ROTC students. Student senators Christopher Spadafora and Aditya Sreekumar proposed the resolution allowing ROTC students to schedule classes early to better accommodate strict ROTC schedules.
Chuck Ruch, associate provost for Information Resources and Technology (IRT), spoke to Student Senate about the network connectivity issue and what IRT wants to do to fix these issues.
“[Our goal] is to have 100 percent coverage all of the time,” Ruch said.
He urged Student Senate to inform students to call the Technology Helpdesk when problems occur, which would help when IRT requests university funding for these upgrades.
Ruch said that if money was not an issue, the system could be updated in one year. However, funding the multi-million dollar project is difficult, so getting students to report problems helps the department acquire funding, he said.
Student Senate moved to help by proposing a resolution for network improvement. This resolution declared that Student Senate is committed to improving the speed and reliability of internet services on campus. Another resolution was proposed to replace the main scanner in the library.
Student Senate is also working on other projects. A non-smoking policy on campus is in the works, led by the Campus Safety committee. An open forum, where students can comment on the issue, will be opened in a few weeks, according to Vice President of Campus Safety Cody Lonigro.
“Right now, we are in the process of creating a student forum,” Lonigro said. “It is something we as an exec, as a [Student] Senate, feel is necessary.”
Lonigro said that the forum is needed to gauge whether students want the proposed policy or not.
“My goal for this resolution being passed is by the end of the semester,” Lonigro said.
Student Senate is also in the process of entirely revamping their constitution as well as reconstructing the student government organization and election process.
“I know last year, me and the sub-committee went through, and we were trying to get rid of things that didn’t really make sense and processes that weren’t really working,” Vice President of Internal Affairs Jen Swenson said.
According to Student Body President Jason Blumenthal, the Student Senate constitution has only been completely revised once in its history. Just this year, there have been more than 30 small revisions regarding word choice, taking out non-existing elements and adding existing elements.
“We are going to go section by section of the constitution of Internal Affairs and make sure that we are configured with what the university uses and says student government does, which we are currently not,” Blumenthal said. “We are going to get up to that standard.”
