With the abundance of snow Ashland received this past week, ASSOU held this meeting through Zoom to ensure the safety of their fellow students and members. After sharing some stories on everyone’s snow day, the meeting began with SOU’s Land Acknowledgement. Shortly after, the agenda was corrected and approved, starting this meeting with division updates.
The recent Climate Conference went well. There is a new job opening for SOU’s Raider Welcome team. This job listing, along with other campus jobs, can be found on Handshake.
ROTC is getting ready for their winter field training, as well as the upcoming Memorial Death March.
The new student fee was discussed, and as it seems now, the proposed new fee will have a $17 increase. The choice was made to maintain a similar budget to our 2022-2023 budget. If the current student fee remains the same, the budget would go down by roughly 300k. The $17 increase is seen as the most balanced choice to maintain a similar budget, while adding another large fee for students to pay. There was another fee increase that was analyzed– a break even increase of $58.
While increasing the fee by $58 would provide the school with a bigger budget for clubs and organizations, the fee was seen as unreasonable and unrealistic for students to pay.
The fee proposal will have final voting for approval on March 6th. Should the fee be denied, the proposal will be managed until a solution is found. Time is of the essence, as Winter term nears its end, the final fee would be best approved sometime before the next academic year.
Another proposal was made in regards to a possible addition to the Code of Ethics. The proposal would focus on communication: No expectation for email responses after 8 pm, Google Calendar invites should be responded to within 2 days, and having no expectations for students or faculty to work on days where the campus is closed (Academic working days requiring students on campus with classes in session).
At the end of the meeting, the ASSOU members all gave kudos to their peers and made some final announcements, one regarding the renowned drag queen Miss Jaxon, who will be performing on the Rogue Party Bus with Bleu Dinah on April 28th.
