SGA should continue putting students first

With a new school year comes a new SGA with a new set of goals. Those goals should continue SGA’s support of putting students first.
Last year, SGA focused on making the campus better for students. Hopefully, they will continue to improve and help out UCA.
SGA should stick by its motto, “Students First.”
The Big Idea project was a great way for the student government to get students involved on campus and make them feel that they had a say on campus. By using students’ ideas to create projects that will actually be implemented on campus, SGA showed that the opinions of students could actually create change on campus.
The projects, used with unspent SGA money, included an amphitheater, improvements to Ida Waldran, and a disk golf course. All of the projects affected students by giving them more to do.
SGA has already shown promise with the creation of a transparency committee, which was created to keep school officials open and honest. This is an especially important step now, with UCA in the news because of former UCA President Allen Meadors’ problems with tranparency.
SGA needs to push its open forum more than it has in the past. While an open forum for students to voice concerns to the SGA senate is a good idea in theory, it has rarely been used, possibly because few students know about it. If SGA wants to prove it truly cares about what students want, it should advertise its open forum more than it has in the past.
Toward the end of the last school year, SGA created a diversity committee for the purpose of hearing concerns from international, non-traditional, and transfer students. This should continue to be a priority for SGA. Proving they care about the problems of these students will go a long way towards making students on campus happier with their experiences.
SGA’s new president, Austin Hall, has been vocal about supporting a review of fees that students pay. He has focused on a testing fee that UCA charges students, even though the test it funded is no longer given.
The fee is put directly in the general fund for UCA, which helps fund pay for general expenses. Sorting out all student fees is a good way to decide which fees are important and which are not. While the student testing fee is not a large fee, if the test does not exist, it should not be called a testing fee.
SGA has spent enough time on email, though. A lot of time and energy was spent on updating the email systems, and now that they have been, SGA needs to put those resources into more dire needs for students.
Last year, SGA proved it was interested in making the lives of student better and more fun. SGA should continue this trend this year and continue to try to speak for students and make UCA’s campus a better place for students, despite administrative problems.