A committee of five stood before the student assembly in Meharry Hall Sunday night to present its report regarding the various chambers of student government. The committee announced with a laugh one of its discoveries: Too many people spend time on Facebook rather than paying attention during meetings.
Committee members include seniors Ellen Clayton, Jason Blasdel and Roy Leaf, juniors Jonathan Rosario and Crystal Depay and freshman Alex Lemna. They were selected for their involvement in student government as well as other university groups to assess the chambers of student government through observation and reporting.
Members of the committee sat in on one meeting of the senate, the executive body, the allocations board and the student assembly. Following the observational period, the five sat down for two hours to write a report on their initial findings.
The group concluded that the two greatest issues for student government are communication and collaboration.
"A lot of things are very divided, and they're meant to be — there's senate, there's representatives, there's executives — but communication between those three, communication with the people, really needs to be improved," Clayton said.
The report recommends a retreat for student government members so that they can get to know one another and feel more comfortable communicating within as well as between chambers.
Student body president senior Charles Pierre said he disagreed with some aspects of the report as communication between chambers has improved vastly in his time in office as compared to the communication in previous years.
"There's been a collaborative effort on every issue that we've sponsored, so I was a little taken aback by that," Pierre said. "I think that if the GEC (Government Evaluation Committee) had done a little bit more homework, they would have realized that fact."
The committee also recommended that student government continue to reach out to the student body in order to let students know what exactly they are working on. They commended senior senator Samantha Wong for reaching out to fraternities and sororities in order to gain recognition for a white paper regarding sexual assault that she is working on.
Clayton and committee chair senior Roy Leaf referred to this practice as "bringing student government out of student government" so that students are able to have a better grasp of what student government is doing.
Pierre said student government has already began implementing many of the ideas brought forth by the committee. Some of these ideas overlapped with ideas student government already had for bettering itself.
"It's nice to see, not necessarily the redundancy of it, but we thought of something similar to the group so I guess our thinking was great," Pierre said.
One such area that student government sought to improve prior to the committee's recommendation was allowing members of the student assembly to discuss prevalent issues during an open forum period at each student assembly meeting.
The first open forum occurred during Sunday night's meeting and resulted in sparse comments.
"The conversation wasn't as engaging to begin with, but I think that it got the ball rolling for the rest of the semester," Pierre said.
The Government Evaluation Committee initially set out to report on the allocations board, but decided that the issue was "particularly complicated" and as a result decided to do further reporting before releasing any formal statements.
Clayton said publishing a report on the allocations board on Friday along with the other reports would not have been helpful as it would be too narrow in spectrum. She also said that because the board controls so much funding and is currently in the public eye, the committee needed to proceed with caution in reporting.
"We did sort of save it for the last because it's the one we're all sort of dreading, and it's a pretty difficult issue, so we decided to put it off," Clayton said. "It's not over, but we decided to go deeper and report."
Clayton said the report regarding the allocations board will be released in coming weeks and that she believes the results of her committee's investigation will have a profound impact.
"I really think it will be fruitful," Clayton said. "These suggestions have the potential to make a very positive change."