The Mississippi State University Student Association Senate met for the last business meeting this fall semester, and before they concluded for the remainder of the year, they discussed 10 pieces of legislation.
Act 6 was passed by voice vote and appropriated funds for several organizations on campus. Some notable highlights include appropriations for the Latino Student Association’s Dia de Los Muertos event, MSU Dance Marathon’s Beat Ole Miss Week and the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing’s Fall Events. The remaining $2,756 in the SA’s appropriations budget will carry over for the next semester.
Moving on to resolutions, the Senate passed seven and tabled one during this week’s meeting. Resolution 7 shows student approval for more diversity in MSU’s hiring of faculty. Currently, some departments have low or non-existent minority representation, and both students and faculty alike have communicated this issue to the Senate. Therefore, the Senate urges the administration to find a solution to this disparity.
Resolution 8 recommends the administration change the course drop deadline at the beginning of the semester from the fifth-class day at 5 p.m. to the fifth-class day at 11:59 p.m., which helps students to experience early evening labs before they must drop the course.
Resolution 9 expresses student support for the implementation of the Freenters program on campus. Currently, the price of printing one page on university printers is 10 cents, which is higher than other prominent universities. To help reduce this cost, Freenters would be instituted on campus printers.
Freenters is an established advertising company that works by installing programming on printers which will scan the document being printed and, for every four pages, print an advertisement cover page that does not alter the printed file in any way. There is no scanning of the document itself, so no privacy concerns should arise.
Additionally, it costs the university nothing to install, and it will be completely optional for students to use. When used, the rate for printing will be lowered as some of the advertising revenue that Freenters acquires will go toward offsetting the cost of printing for the university, which will thereby lower the cost for the student.
Cabinet Academic Affairs Co-director Josh Hartley gave a hearing to Senate to explain Freenters in detail, and he will meet with administration about this proposition in the near future.
Resolution 10 requests the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning, or IHL, create an interdisciplinary mental health task force to help address the growing need on college campuses for mental healthcare. The other student associations under the jurisdiction of the IHL will craft similar resolutions, as the true purpose of the task force is to create statewide mental healthcare standards on campuses.
Resolution 11 seeks to solve the server issues plaguing the Parking and Transit website during the heavy traffic periods accompanying parking registration. Senators Josh McCoy and Ashley Burlesci-Niukkanen worked with Director of Parking Jeremiah Dumas to craft a staggered plan to hopefully solve this issue.
Within the plan, resident and commuters parking spots are separate classifications, and within the commuter classification, the preferential order goes senior, junior, sophomore and freshman. If one of these classifications has 20 percent of the population, for example if lot A has 100 parking spots, then that classification will receive 20 parking spots in lot A.
The staggering will cater to residents first, since their spots are already designated, and then the staggering will address the commuters, based on the previously discussed system.
In addition to Resolution 10, Resolution 12 requests a campus-wide traffic study to better understand current traffic patterns, which will hopefully allow future legislation and administrative policy to alleviate problem areas.
Resolution 13 expresses student approval for the administration’s plans for implementing more water bottle refill stations in some of the buildings around campus which lack them.
A final, unnumbered resolution was put to the floor, which sought to establish a student government scholarship for incoming freshmen who participated in their high school’s student council or equivalent body. The resolution would have used the appropriation funds often left over in the Senate budget after a semester, and it attempted to address the fact that only incoming freshmen who were student body presidents in their high school receive any financial recognition for their achievements. However, the Senate tabled the resolution for being incomplete and undetailed.
The Senate also tabled Bill 4 after being brought to the floor. Bill 4 is an altered form of Bill 3, which failed approximately a month ago, but its author, Senator McCoy, changed its contents in hopes of making it more palatable to the Senate floor. Originally, the bill stipulated that one missed office hour would equate to one missed Senate meeting, of which senators can only miss three. Bill 4 loosened the requirements by stipulating two missed office hours would equate to one missed Senate meeting. Bill 4 was failed by the Rules and Legislation Committee before the Senate meeting began, but Senator McCoy forced it to the floor anyways, asking why it was failed. Then, Senator Savannah Metz tabled the bill, responding there was too much up in the air about the bill to put it to a vote.
Finally, Bill 3, not to be confused with previously failed Bill 3, was passed by voice vote and changed the SA’s Constitution’s wording to allow for greater leeway in election times during the spring semester.