Assembly elections and the Student Association’s first annual report highlighted the organization’s first meeting of February on Monday night.

Current SA members elected ten representatives to fill open positions in the assembly at its meeting in Maxwell Auditorium. The candidates represented various home colleges and went through a series of questions and voting to determine who would fill the seats.

In the only contested election of the night, 11 candidates vied for five open seats in the assembly for the College of Arts and Sciences. The candidates fielded questions from current assembly members before leaving the room for a discussion period. The discussion period then moved to a series of voting, eventually arriving at the five representatives.

Another five students were elected as representatives of their home colleges, which included the School of Information Studies, School of Architecture, School of Education and David B. Falk College of Sport and Human Dynamics.

Julia Eklund, a freshman political science and policy studies major and newly elected representative, said she is interested in working on the Student Life Committee to make mid-semester reports from professors more extensive, which she said will be beneficial for students.

Connor Bradley, a freshman inclusive elementary and special education major and newly elected representative, said that he has a big background in the Special Olympics and thinks more can be done to help the special needs community on campus and make every student feel included.

President Boris Gresely also discussed the release of SA’s first annual report during the meeting. Gresely reminded SA members to share the report with fellow students and said the report will help answer questions about what the organization does.

“It has been something that students have wanted for a while now,” he said.

The report was released Monday morning and was sent to all SU students via email. It highlights the initiatives that SA worked on over the past year and some of their plans for the spring semester.

One of the major initiatives discussed in the report is the newly introduced Chat and Dine Lunch Program. This program gives students and faculty members the ability to interact over lunch at either Goldstein Faculty or the Alumni Center.

Some other initiatives included in the report were the creation of a Consent Campaign in attempts to end sexual assault on campus and the addition of four heat lamps in South Campus bus stops to keep students warm.

Initiative plans for the Spring 2015 semester outlined in the report include working to add nutritional information labels in the dining halls, creating a first generation empowerment program and working with the Office of Academic Affairs to create a Multi-Lingual writing center to help foreign language students.

Published on February 3, 2015 at 1:58 am

Contact William: wrnorris@syr.edu