SGA returns from President Days' weekend with new updates
Ellis McGinley – Copy Editor
The Student Government Association heard and processed updates from its committees during their first meeting back after President Day's break.
The Board of Student Experience shared a report on its recent communications with Erin Duff, COVID-19 coordinator.
"Neff Hall has been closed for residential students. No residents are living there; however, it is being used for quarantine housing or can be used for quarantine housing," said Brandon Lovene, vice president of the Board of Student Experience.
"The only time it has been used this semester was for late arrival students who had to complete their seven-day quarantine and test out twice," said Lovene. "There were no issues with that, and it is not currently being used for quarantining."
The board also addressed concerns around dining in quarantine isolation housing, which has been reworked with Sodexo, and housing of multiple quarantine or isolation students in one dorm.
"Isolated means that a student is positive and no more than two positive students are housed together. They are also only housed together if they test positively on the same day," said Lovene.
The J. Philip Smith Outstanding Teaching award is awarded annually to a full-time and part-time faculty member.
"We discussed getting the kind of parameters set for the number of nominations a faculty member needs to be considered for the award and we have a spreadsheet set up for how many nominations each faculty have been performed. There's one faculty member that has 39 nominations."
Finance major Noah Falcioni, a sophomore, updated the Student Government Association on the workings of the Board of Outstanding Teaching Advising Committee.
"It took us twice to vote as we soon realized that looking through 1,100 pages of applications wasn't fun. We're still ironing it out, but the results were that full-time needs four nominations, part-time needs four as well, and for the outstanding adviser position you need three nominations.," Falcioni said.
"In a previous year, a faculty member won without one nomination from a student. If it's an outstanding teaching and advising award, then the students' voice should be there. So, we added to the guidelines that they need a nomination from a student," Falcioni said.
Biology major Zainab Seyal, a representative, said "in the student policy committee one of the issues that was talked about was the academic dismissal policy."
"One thing that the committee wants to do is have part-time students who have accumulated 12 credits for fall or spring semester be on the Dean's List," Seyal also said.
"Currently if students are dismissed from Southern, they are able to appeal once. Students can only appeal once after being dismissed. That was discussed about changed to having no cap. Sometimes there have been cases where students appealed once and are close to meeting the criteria, they need but they're not quite there yet."
In the open concerns portion of the meeting, students discussed difficulties with hands-on classes and snow days.
"I'd like to address how easily we're going into snow days this semester. There have been a few days where we have gotten snow going into the forecast and the snow did not necessarily meet up to what we were expecting.
Music and theatre students are having a really tough time with that transition," said psychology major Keegan Smith, a junior. He was referred to the Board of Student Experience for further discussion.
"I have not been personally impacted, but I sympathize with the difficulty it takes to do the arts, especially with COVID," Lovene said. "Even during normal times, arts kind of get tossed under the rug. It might seem like a simple solution nowadays, let us hop onto Zoom and do our classes instead."