Student Government doesn’t create campus culture, said SG presidential candidate James Scott. Rather, Scott and his vice presidential running mate April Parsons say SG should provide the services students need to create that culture for themselves.
“We should provide the services, and provide the voice and the representation,” he said. The SG president should devote more focus to making sure SG runs efficiently internally, he said, so it can effectively provide the services and support students, and clubs and organizations need.
He recently co-sponsored a bill with three other SG senators, which passed through the senate last week, to create a committee with $7,000 seed money to put art—murals, sculptures, paintings, etc.—on campus. The current senator held the president position once before, in 2010-2011. During his previous time as president, he pushed for the campus garden that is now behind the Piano Man building and tended by the Garden Club and other students (an initial $15,000 allocation); and that the new Multi-Purpose Student Center be sustainable and LEED certified.
Scott said sustainability is a major part of his platform. He wants to work to have USFSP take on the Presidents’ Climate Commitment, which calls for colleges and universities to implement plans for climate neutrality.
Scott will graduate at the end of the summer 2012 semester. He plans to take graduate classes next year while saving money to eventually move to pursue a graduate degree. He sees involvement in SG while taking graduate courses as an opportunity to represent an often-underrepresented group of students.
“That’s a perspective I don’t have, and I think it would be a real benefit to the organization to have that perspective,” he said.
Vice presidential candidate April Parsons is set to graduate Dec. 2012, and plans on applying to the new Digital Journalism and Design master’s program or taking political science classes upon completing the requirements for her bachelor’s degree.
As vice president, Parsons would work to improvement the flow of information to club leadership. When attending a meeting for club presidents this year, she said she was surprised to find the number of club leaders who did not realize their clubs had a budget.
“They had no idea that they had this money, and they had no idea how to spend it,” Parsons said. SG should be more in tune to changes in club leadership, working with the clubs to ensure continuity from year to year, she said.
She wants to “help the different leaders of the clubs understand the power they have with the money they’re given,” she said.
Part of that means changing the club budget process. Currently, when a club requests money to use to put on an event, a bill is written that must pass through the senate—opening up sometimes small amounts of money to a higher level of scrutiny than Scott and Parsons see necessary.
Parsons supports a grant-based approach to club budgets, led by a board or committee that does not include the entire Senate. Scott said that while he does not currently have a strong opinion on whether it should be handled through grants or budgets, and would want the issue debated in the Senate first, he said the process for club budgets should be “front-end and user friendly.”
Ideally, clubs would be able to use a form on the SG website to make budget or grant requests, he said. The SG website currently sits in limbo after a $4,000 investment during Scott’s presidency to pay a professional firm to revamp the website failed to produce. More money was put into the project, but personnel changes and confusion over what needed to be done has the site at a standstill.
“It’s been a two-year endeavor that’s just gone nowhere, and that is a very high priority,” he said.
Scott also lobbied Tallahassee to allow an equalization of A&S fees for USFSP. USFSP’s fees increased, and the money was put toward the new student center. Scott said he wants the student center and the newly renovated Campus Activities Center to be “cozy places” where students can spend time outside of classes or study. Because of renovations to the CAC, the building’s offices, many occupied by students, were moved temporarily to other places.
“I think we’re more connected as a student life to our spaces than we thought,” he said. “I think Student Government has a really active role to make sure that those buildings are cozy, and they have they don’t have old dingy furniture, and they have art work up, and plants inside and lots of benches out and about, and TVs for communication and places to study.”
He also said that during his year as president, SG increased the amount allocated to Leadership programming on campus. The department puts on events throughout the year aimed at getting students to take an active role in campus and community life.
Scott said that some of these projects that affect student life, like the Multi-Purpose Student Center or the Student Green Energy Fund (a new fee which students voted to approve last year and which is meant to fund sustainability projects on campus), needed support from the USF system to be successful.
“Being connected with the system as a whole can go hand in hand with having more of a voice” within the system, Scott said.
This year’s general election is taking place earlier than usual, giving the president-elect the opportunity to vie for the overall USF student body president position and possibly the student seat on the USF Board of Trustees, per an agreement signed by the four USF campuses in May 2011, while Scott was president.
Scott said he sees himself as being enrolled in the USF system and USFSP equally. USFSP’s interests should come first to the USFSP SG president, he said, but the interests of the system should be a close second.
Scott said compromising on projects is an important part of the job. He has taken a hard stance on some projects, standing up for designated smoking areas when the administration was pushing for a complete tobacco ban on campus (though the ban did go into effect Jan. 2012) and pushing for the campus garden.
“I view the administration as allies,” he said. “And you don’t always have to agree with your allies.”
Photo by Aaron Dalley
