Mandi Mooney
Online Managing Editor
October 20, 2004
The Student Government Association held its annual open forum at Opie’s Pizza Monday night, offering free pizza to the student body in the hopes of receiving feedback, critiques and ideas for changes from the student body and faculty.
“We were disappointed with the response in comparison to last year’s forum,” said junior Deke Bowman who coordinated the event. “This year roughly 50 [students] attended and last year we had over 160.”
Numerous details limited the response to the forum at Opie’s Pizza. The event was relatively unpublicized, sophomores were busy studying for a humanities exam and e-mail filter difficulties kept the event information from being distributed to the student body.
The forum, which has been an annual event in years past, is designed to help SGA get response and feedback from the student body about issues they are concerned about or ideas they would like SGA to focus on. Students were asked four main questions. The questions asked students to include positive aspects about Milligan, realistic changes that could be made during the current school year, what they thought SGA’s role on campus was and how Milligan’s SGA is doing as a student government.
“It is an important tool for us to be able to understand what the student body desires in change and their expectations of SGA and the campus,” said Bowman. “The open forum has come a long way from the time when we first had it and only one non-SGA person showed up.”
Faculty members and administration also attended the forum to talk with students, receive feedback and pose ideas for SGA.
“The faculty members were very supportive as they offered some good insights and opinions that weren’t completely contrary to the students,” said Bowman. “They also shed light on why some things are the way they are.”
In its meeting Tuesday morning, SGA divided into the three subcommittees to discuss the ideas presented by the student body. Ideas from students ranged from “grating down Mt. St. Helen” (the speedbump behind Hart Hall) to changing the school’s policy on off-campus drinking for students over 21 years of age.
“SGA seriously looks at all the responses,” said Bowman.
In the Finance and Business subcommittee, members discussed researching and beginning the process for delivering proposals to SGA and the administration to make changes. While proposing for the height of one speed bump to be lowered would not require the same amount of time that proposing to change a major policy would take, the SGA members said they do not want to ignore the student body’s requests. Bowman stated that the faculty would be receptive to proposals that are largely researched and well -thought out.
In the meeting, SGA President Rachel Cunningham stated that she hopes that incorporating the ideas and feedback received from the students will help to increase SGA’s effectiveness to the student body.