Four resolutions passed, 2020 budget introduced
Four resolutions passed unanimously and the 2020 Student Government Association (SGA) budget was introduced at Tuesday’s meeting.
Two of the passed resolutions dealt with law students and were sponsored by Senator and law school representative Garrett Keegan.
Resolution 28 “urges the new Dean of the Law School to budget for the hooding ceremony of the graduating class.”
Keegan said this resolution is important because it costs each class $5000 to fund their own hooding ceremony.
“After three years of putting in hard work and taking time away from their families and loved ones, a lot of us thought that it seems ridiculous that we have to go outside of the law school and have to fundraise for our own hooding ceremony,” Keegan said. “We thought the law school should be able to provide some funds in order to take off that financial burden.”
Resolution 29 addresses the issue of law students having a limited time period to pay $20 for exam software.
“It wasn’t the funds that we were necessarily worried about, it’s that if you don’t pay for the exam software, you have to handwrite a four-hour exam which is a real pain,” Keegan said. “So we’re hoping that’s just added into the tuition that way students don’t have to run up to the dean’s office a week before exams and say ‘hey I forgot to pay for this’ and there not be a remedy.”
Other resolutions passed include Resolution 25, which approved the General Activity Fee allocations for 2020. Resolution 26 was also passed to honor Deborah Dodge for her service at USD.
Also presented at the meeting was the fiscal year 2020 SGA budget.
Important changes to note include the medical school line will be absolved and will be categorized under the small organization line. The club sports success fund will also be cut “due to lack of utilization since its creation.”
Josh Sorbe, SGA president, said one of the big issues is rate utilization with student organizations receiving money from SGA.
“We need to ask ‘what did you use of your fund last year and why should we give you 100% this year?’” Sorbe said.
The budget was sent to the finance committee for further discussion and will be brought up again at next week’s meeting.
The group also reflected on the success of Students for Higher Education Days last week.
Madison Green, SGA Vice President, said it was a great opportunity for the 13 senators, plus past executive staff Teegan McNary, Josh Anderson and Lucas Lunges.
While they were there, SGA representatives were able to testify against Senate Bill (SB) 122 and House Bill (HB) 1087, bills they had previously passed emergency legislation advocating against.
Today SB 122 failed, while HB 1087 passed with amendments.
“We’re happy obviously that the result of 122 ended up matching our stance on it,” Green said. “1087 with the amendments is much more preferred than what it was on its face originally, so we’re happy to see that some of the amendments have catered to what we wanted to see as students.”
