by Aaron Butts
In the past two weeks, two different town halls were held by Student Government (SG) to assess the issues that students were having, and to hear complaints from students on what was and wasn’t working on campus.
For commuters, their meeting mainly focused around the parking situation that exists among all students, but is especially harsh on commuters. “Commuters focused on having a ‘commuter only’ lot or partition a larger parking lot into a ‘commuter only’ parking lot.” Travis Dilley, the SG vice president of communications said about the meeting.
Parking has been a problem for many students for quite some time, but commuters bear the brunt of it since they need to use their cars regularly while residential students may not need to use their cars as much which is why many commuters are asking for a priority to be made in accommodating them.
Another issue that was brought up, that SG wasn’t aware of, is the desire for a new commuter lounge “We weren’t really aware that they wanted a new space for commuters to hang out and do their homework in.” said Dilley, who explained that although there was already a designated area for commuters in Schneider lounge outside of the SG office, many other schools have more enclosed areas with microwaves or other kitchen type areas that are more accessible and useful to commuters.
These new changes to the campus center may come next year, as Dilley explained that renovations were in the works for the campus center “I know they are remodeling the first floor of the campus center,” Dilley said, “so that will be something we will be looking into, either to improve the one that is already existing or working with the administration to create a new space for them.”
A week before the commuter town hall, the general town hall seemed to focus a lot on issues with scheduling that frustrated students every semester, “We talked about academic improvements.” Said Dilley, “We wanted to see more departments working together so that students with double majors in different departments wouldn’t get blocked out of classes they needed to have in order to graduate on time.”
But beyond that, SG is hoping to restructure the way students register for classes in a big way “Right now our academic affairs committee is working on completely renovating the minor programs to provide minors for some programs that don’t have minors currently.” Dilley said. Among the examples, Dilley cited ASL and Athletic training
“We’re trying to increase offerings as well,” Mitchell Stith SG vice president said, “and also I brought up that we need to reduce the amount of classes that happen after 4pm because they are interfering with a lot of extracurricular activities.”
So far this semester, SG has already done a lot, but more is yet to come. One example of a change students have seen on campus already in new hours for dining facilities “major thing to happen so far is getting the Cru Club and the Mezz to be open more often” said Stith.
As far as plans for the future go, SG plans are also leaning towards bringing a more diverse kind of entertainment to Capital “We want to bring a semi-large artist to Capital.” SG president Bobbi Wilson said, while also saying that artists such as Lady Gaga would not be in SG’s price range due to the already restricted budget that they are working on, which has been a big problem for SG this year.
“The biggest thing is lack of funding.” Wilson said “We wish we could fund everyone but we’ve had more organizations ask for more money than usual.”
“It’s great that we have more organizations coming to us,” Stith said, “but we need to be able to fund them.”
But an even bigger goal for SG this year, is a process that may not be completed by the time next fall rolls around, “Another thing we’ve been trying to do is build a better relationship with Bexley.” Wilson said “We’ve met with mayor Kessler and we’ve talked about how he wants to make this a working downtown. There are a lot of misconceptions that Bexley doesn’t like us that aren’t true.”
SG has a lot on their plate as they move forward into the end of the semester, with a lot of things in the works, such as encouraging restructuring of the housing lottery program, which many may agree is another very stressful process for Capital students, as well as a focus on fixing up some of the dorms that we already have. And getting more involved in faculty committees around the University is an important goal for SG as a way to keep students plugged in and connected with all the issues affecting Capital.
A daunting list of tasks lies before SG for the upcoming semester; it’s just a question of time and resources to determine if and when these things get done.
If someone wasn’t able to make it to the town halls, SG encourages them to express their concerns so that they can be more aware of the sentiment of the students. SG is even initiating a program on their website called the “Fix-It initiative” which is a way that students can submit issues to SG from their website capital.edu/sg. “It should be online within the next month or so” Dilley said.
abutts@capital.edu
