UPDATED: Oct. 30, 2018 at 11:29 p.m.

Student Association Vice President Kyle Rosenblum presented an initiative to expand student feedback and the assembly voted to fund dozens of campus organizations during Monday night’s meeting.

Currently, SA has one student feedback box located in the Schine Student Center lobby, where students can write suggestions on how to improve campus life, Rosenblum said. In front of the SA assembly, he said SA needed more resources for students to give feedback.

”We should be more actively trying to reach more students,” Rosenblum said during the meeting.

Rosenblum said he hopes to see four to eight more boxes throughout active areas on campus. Possible stations include Bird Library, various dining halls and residence halls, the Hall of Languages and other academic buildings, according to the presentation.

The current suggestion box receives five to 10 suggestions per week, Rosenblum said. He added that he hopes to add the additional suggestion boxes by the beginning of the spring semester.

The amount of suggestion boxes that are added largely depends on cost, which is more than $700 for eight boxes, Rosenblum said in the presentation.

SA’s Director of Technology David Fox advocated for SA to fund his Campus Safety Challenge, a 24-hour hackathon-style competition meant to present ideas to combat prevalent issues on campus, Fox said.

In an interview after the meeting, Fox said he went to the student body and asked what students thought were the most prevalent issues on campus. The top three issues were bias and racism, sexual assault and rape and mental health.

Fox said the event was important since the administration “hasn’t done enough” to combat these issues after the Theta Tau controversy in spring 2018.

“Administration wants to think everyone is over Theta Tau, but it’s only brought light to other problems that exist on our campus. The solutions don’t exist because our school simply does not care enough. But the students do,” a slide of his presentation read.

The event, hosted by SA, will be a two-day competition on Nov. 10 and 11, where teams will have 24 hours to build solutions to the three outlined problems.

SA voted to allocate $4,204 to help fund the event.

SA Comptroller Ambrose Gonzalez listed dozens of campus organizations that requested funding from SA for the spring semester. Gonzalez estimated that more than 130 campus organizations requested funding after the meeting.

Notable amounts of funding for organizations include:

• Alpha Phi Alpha received $55,483 to fund their All Black Affair, Soul Cafe and Truth Be Told event.
• First Year Players’ “Newsies” was fully funded at $36,020.42.
• Habitat for Humanity’s spring festival was fully funded at $5,414.50.
• The Multicultural Greek Council received $5,500 in funding for their Multicultural Greek Experience.
• Alpha Omega Epsilons’ charity ball was partially funded at $1,661.

Other Business

• Rosenblum said he spoke with the bookstore to talk about textbook affordability. He said he is looking into what is known as the “Inclusive Access” textbook model. Rosenblum said this “cuts out all the middle components” in textbook sales, making them cheaper for students.
• Cassandra Pravata was elected as the new SA historian.
• SA’s Thankful for Syracuse week will begin next week. The week includes a food drive for Hendricks Chapel food pantry and the Food Bank of Central New York.

CORRECTION: In a previous version of this story, Justice Abud was incorrectly named as a new Student Association historian. Cassandra Pravata was the only new SA historian elected. The Daily Orange regrets this error.  

Published on October 30, 2018 at 12:01 am

Contact Gabe: gkstern@syr.edu | @gabestern326