The Student Senate voted on Wednesday to approve a search for an attorney that students can utilize for free. The Legal Services Program has a maximum of $200,000 set as a salary for the attorney.
Student Body President Jia Wen Wang said she hopes to have an attorney hired by the spring semester.
The Senate will create a hiring committee. Wang predicted it will mostly be made up of SGA leadership and SGA student advocates, who she said have historically been the people that students go to seek legal advice the attorney will now provide.
“It’s really unfortunate because students come to SGA a lot for resources, and from the description of the advocates you would expect the advocates to be able to (help with legal advice),” Wang told The Sunflower. “But obviously we’re not lawyers, so we can’t give legal advice outside of anything SGA.”
Wang said advocates, whose primary role is to help students with issues like academic, parking and traffic appeals, would often point students needing legal help to non-profits. But Wang and SGA Advisor Gabriel Fonseca pointed out that not all students qualify for those services.
“There are several non-profit organizations in the state, and the city as well, that provide some (legal services), but our students don’t qualify for those,” Fonseca said in the meeting. “Our international students don’t qualify for those.”
That’s where the Legal Services Program comes in, to provide those services for all fee-paying students.
Wang said she wants the committee to hire a lawyer with a diverse range of experience because students have diverse issues.
“With an attorney, sometimes they’re pretty specialized, but we have such a wide range of students of all different backgrounds, and I want to make sure that the lawyer kind of knows what they’re in for,” Wang said. “I don’t want to throw in somebody who is only really specialized in one area, and then we send the student to them and then they’re unable to help (the student) through that legal issue.”
Wang also said that she wants someone who can understand the student experience.
“How can you serve your clients if you don’t understand what they’re going through, you know?” Wang said.
While Underserved Senator Evelyn Lewis expressed concern about the amount of money going toward the program, Liberal Arts and Sciences Senator Victoria Owens felt differently.
“This is honestly lower than I thought it would be, to be honest, because anything about law, typically you find your niche, you sit in that niche and you get paid a pretty decent sum,” Owens said. “But if this person, this lawyer, is going into every niche — family law, immigration, things like that — you need a very, very experienced and dedicated and a really professional lawyer, so this a great figure to me.”
When asked if she was worried the salary cap would be too low to attract a lawyer that can uphold SGA’s expectations, Wang said that the $200,000 figure came from consulting with an attorney in the area and looking at attorney salaries in Wichita.
“I think it would be a different story if we just kind of made up an arbitrary number and took a shot in the dark,” Wang said.
The $200,000 will come out of SGA’s special projects fund, which is typically around $2 million. Due to budget cuts following last year’s budget shortfall, Wang said the special projects fund is slightly lower this year, but did not specify how much.
Wang did not respond to a followup request for the exact starting budget for the special projects fund.
Despite the Legal Services Program using over 10% of the fund, Wang says she’s not concerned about the cost.
“(The special projects fund) are fee dollars, so students have already paid, so for me, I guess fiscally I think the responsible thing is to utilize those dollars to help students on campus,” Wang said.
Wang also confirmed that the $200,000 is solely for the lawyer’s salary, and any other legal costs a student faces will be up to them to fund. SGA has a hardship fund that students can apply to receive financial assistance from for a variety of financial challenges.
Speaker of the Senate Matthew Phan, who was Student Body Vice President during last year’s session, spoke in affirmation of the bill during the meeting. He said the program was something he and former Student Body President Kylee Hower explored last year.
“I think there is a demand from students to have legal services provided by the Student Government Association,” Phan said. “Especially with last year, a lot of our international students wanted to have a panel on where they could get legal advice from an attorney — an immigration attorney — or from different students dealing with different concerns that they had from a legal perspective.”
At the Student Government Association’s weekly meeting on Sept. 24, Wang said this program has been in discussion within SGA for the past five years. In an interview with The Sunflower, she said this bill was something she had planned to pass during her session.
“This project was a project that I intended on following through,” Wang said.
Owens, Lewis, and Liberal Arts and Sciences Senators Braeden Miller and Joshua Mallard also spoke in affirmation of the bill during the debate period. No senators spoke in opposition to the bill.
“I think that this will really mark itself as a pretty momentous occasion in the Student Government Association’s history,” Miller said.
