Attendance: Victoria, Yehyun, Emma, Thea, Oliver, Grant, Kabir, Jorja
Agenda: StuCo Exec Board Agenda 24/25
- Call to order (1:00-1:02)
- Roll Call (1:02-1:05)
- Adoption of Agenda (1:05-1:06)
- Approval of Minutes (1:06-1:07)
- Community Comments (1:07-1:17)
- Old Business (1:17-1:27)
- New Business 1 (1:27-1:42): Plenary Debrief
- Adjournment (1:57-2:00)
Call to Order
Victoria: I call this meeting to order at 1:05pm.
Emma: More than half of Exec board is in attendance. Quorum has been met.
Victoria: I move to adopt the agenda. I also move to approve the minutes. Any concerns? The agenda is adopted and the minutes are approved.
Community Comment
Emma: We have no guests today. We have two ford form submissions.
Ford Form: I agree with Jesse’s point from last meeting that it does students no favors to not be exposed to, e.g., MAGA, when such a significant part of the country votes for that platform. Even after the election, much of the well-intentioned “care and community” outreach I saw seemed to take for granted that all students (in some cases, all members of the campus community) wanted Harris to win and are very sad to have Trump in office instead. Statistically, this is a reasonable assumption, but I do think it’s unfortunate to keep verbally distancing ourselves from the possibility of engaging with pro-Trump discussion or community members.
Ford Form: There is one guy who works in the DC who is really really uptight about closing things down way before 7:30 every night. A few nights ago I got up to get some more food at about 7:15 and he told me I would be unable to reenter the dining area once I left. I was confused by this and he finally conceded that I would be able to return only to get my belongings. I understand that the DC employees want to be able to clean up as fast as possible but the DC closes early enough as it is and it is not fun to be kicked out of the dining hall before it even officially closes. I feel like clarifying expectations with the DC staff would be helpful in resolving this going forward.
Grant: I have an announcement as well. The dining center committee had its first meeting last saturday. This was one of the points that the reps brought up as something that was a concern. This is something we will talk about with the head of the DC and something we will continue working on. Our next meeting is tomorrow and I will make sure to bring this up.
Plenary Debrief
Yehyun: We don’t have our general StuCo meeting this week but I wanted to hear from other voices about how we thought plenary went. I want to hear what we thought went well and what we can improve upon. We usually do this with the general council, because we are not meeting this Sunday. I wanted some feedback which is still fresh in our memory.
Emma: I think things went fairly smoothly, we had a hitch with tech, other than that it was great.
Grant: How we fixed that zoom issue in the past was we had more than one person with admin privileges so if one went down we were fine. We can do that in the Spring.
Claire: For Sharpless, there was a period in the middle where people weren’t speaking into the mic so I pulled up the minutes so people could read it. Maybe in terms of slack communication, making sure people are on that. This is a small thing but when we were voting for extra pro/con debate, I would ask for people to vote in the room but the GIAC would decide before then. People were getting a little discouraged.
Emma: There were range issues with the mic, so people stopped using the mic which isn’t helpful for zoom.
Grant: The last time we used the mic runners was like two years ago. I think we can make the mic receiver more central.
Victoria: In general, we can rework the mic passing situation.
Claire: It probably would be good for the sharpless person to have admin access.
Yehyun: For me, I was incredibly grateful for the in person turnout. We had the highest number of in person attendees since Covid. Seeing students showing up and not abusing the zoom link was incredibly uplifting to see. The fact that we didn’t lose quorum was also incredible and a testament to our civic duty and our care for this campus.
Victoria: For the zoom, because I have been sending a lot of primary communications to students, people were emailing me asking for the zoom. I got feedback that the zoom link was not accessible enough. I got a ton of emails from students asking for zoom links. I wanted to ask, is this a recurring thing that happens?
Thea: Usually the zoom link is sent in its own email, not the newsletter. This means less people probably saw it. There were probably people that needed it but didn’t see it.
Emma: We also cracked down more on who can use the zoom. Last year, we didn’t reach quorum so we sent an hc-all with the link. I think it is better having it more stringent so more people come in person.
Victoria: We didn’t necessarily make it harder to have the zoom in the sense of what is a valid accessibility concern, we just made it less advertised.
Emma: You had to fill out a form to get it, instead of just having it sent to everyone.
Grant: We should try to encourage people to attend in person, when we had 300 in zoom we never hit voting quorum. I think going forward, sending a form saying filling out this form is too much, maybe having people send an email requires more reflection.
Victoria: I think this is a good opportunity to encourage students to read the newsletter. We put a lot of information in there that students always ask about that you could get by skimming the newsletter.
Grant: Another thing on quorum, we don’t have our door checkers here, I saw a lot of people leave through the restroom door and just walk out. I saw them watching that, I don’t know if they reduced quorum if they saw that. We may want to be aware of that in the future.
Victoria: Something else happening was people were leaving to get water, I know we had the water cooler. I thought it was empty.
Yehyun: I went to the back to see the water cooler and a third of it was still there.
Victoria: We lost the most number of people during the friendly amendment process. We can work more on announcing that and keeping people updated so they don’t leave.
Grant: I remember the most frustrating part was sitting there and not knowing what was happening. Giving regular updates is helpful.
Victoria: I want time checkers for next time. I didn’t realize when we are facilitating conversations how fast the time goes. It’s hard to keep track of the time. We should make that more of a concrete position.
Oliver: Because turnout and understanding and first years is so important for plenary, Customs did a thing where HCOs did a session beforehand. I think there could be even more collaboration from StuCo’s side on introducing plenary and what happens post plenary.
Victoria: Customs connected with us to do all of that work. We got the packet to them early so they could share it to the freshmen early. It could be worth it during customs week.
Grant; As an RCA, no one goes to those sessions, it should be during customs.
Jorja: People come to the sessions more now because it counts as a PE credit.
Oliver: But athletes don’t need PE.
Victoria: My only concern with that is we would have to re-define when co-presidents start their work. Technically they aren’t supposed to start until the semester starts. That would be something we have to set up for the incoming class and co-presidents.
Thea: One thing we forgot to do, the co-presidents were meant to email faculty and staff letting them know when quorum is, but that didn’t happen so a lot of profs were confused.
Victoria: We decided the plenary dates last Spring. We told senior staff so we thought that faculty would be aware. We will definitely make sure to do this in the future.
Emma: We are going to share the plenary date for next semester with FAPC so they can let faculty know.
Victoria: Plenary next semester is March 23rd. I adjourn this meeting at 1:22pm.
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