Ball State’s Student Government Association (SGA) welcomed Student Trustee Hope Churchill and Chief Administrator Hunter Case to its weekly senate meeting Jan. 22. They spoke about how students can become a student trustee on Ball State’s Board of Trustees, and what the selection process looks like for the position.
Churchill is a fourth-year business administration major at Ball State, with minors in communications and resource management. She was appointed two years ago to be the student trustee by former Gov. Eric Holcomb..
She shared how she was able to attend many campus events through her position, such as the groundbreaking ceremony for the new Cantio Hotel. As the university’s student trustee, Churchill has the same voting rights as all SGA members on top of the voting rights she receives as a member of the board.
Churchill’s mission to “represent the student body to the board by speaking to current student life and issues” is something she encourages other students to do by applying for her position.
“Take a leap of faith by just applying,” she said.
Following her speech, Case shared the requirements to apply for the position and that some of its benefits can be found on the Office of Student Life’s website. The application opened Jan. 22 and closes Feb.19.
After Case’s and Churchill’s senate presentations, President Noah Poole delivered the state of the student body. He shared the current achievements of his administration’s platform points and highlighted the key goals his administration is continuing to try and achieve.
The six areas the administration wanted to improve in were: student experience, safety, health and advocacy, transportation and campus life. These six areas of improvement have one encompassing goal: “Enhancing the student experience for the cardinals of today, while laying the foundation of success for the cardinals of tomorrow,” Poole said.
He updated the senate of the progress made with the executive points.
“I'm happy to report that at a halfway point of our term, out of our initial 18 executive platform objectives, our administration has been able to fully complete, or is in the process of nearing completion, 13 of these objectives,” Poole said.
After Poole’s report, Treasurer Casey Rockel presented various budget reallocations.
The first reallocation was for the safety platform point, in which SGA wanted a comprehensive “reach out” app designed to provide safety information to students. They originally had $3,000 allocated for this but Ball State’s MyBSU dashboard now includes a widget with this information, making it so the app was no longer needed.
For health and advocacy, Rockel added $500 to the disability awareness platform point, making the new total $2,500. Next, he allocated money for support for sexual assault awareness month, adding $800 and making the new total $3,300.
He allocated an additional $1,500 to the transportation platform point since SGA is in the works with parking services to increase signage in those lots.
These reallocations were approved with verbal “yays”, “nays” and abstentions. Following the budget reallocation, Chief of Staff Chelsea Murdock shared during executive reports updates on the identity buttons campaign she is working on.
“I'm hoping to find a rollout date somewhere in the year [during] February, maybe early March, with our counseling center to do some tabling for identity buttons,” Murdock said.
Murdock went on to share an idea that was brought up by a student to have an event to train students how to do CPR and use an automated external defibrillator to learn how to save someone’s life if needed.
With no new or unfinished business, the meeting was adjourned. The next meeting open to the public is on Jan. 29 at 3:15 p.m. in the L.A. Pittenger Student Center.
Contact Shelby Anderson via email at sanderson9@bsu.edu.
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