Student Senate passes student fees bill, no increase
The third student fees bill passed at Wednesday’s Student Government Association meeting.
The new bill keeps student fees flat and maintains $76,000 in reserves. The goal in keeping goals flat was due to the financial problems many students are facing due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The overall goal was to get student fees to be flat, that goal was keeping in mind that many students are going to have difficulty. . . paying for school next year,” Ostermann said.
After much discussion, the committee decided to take a broad approach when reaching the 1.5% decrease.
“We moved into a discussion on essentially how we would achieve that 1.5% number and we talked about as a group whether or not we should go through each line item or take a broad approach,” Ostermann said. “We ended up taking a broad approach to cut almost all departments of 1.5% across the board.”
Student Affairs took the biggest budget cut, a total of about $22,000. Student Affairs had already begun to warn the department to prepare for possible budget reductions.
Vice President of Student Affairs Teri Hall volunteered her department to be cut at discussions before the student fees committee made their recommendations.
The first bill was debated for 14 hours, including an 11 hour marathon session but was failed by senate and sent back to the committee. The second bill was debated on for two hours and passed by senate, but was sent back to the committee by the recommendation of the president and vice president of student affairs due to COVID-19 concerns floating around the 1.5% proposed budget increase.
Lindsay Smith is the former editor-in-chief and newsletter editor for The Sunflower. Smith was a journalism major at Wichita State with a minor in creative...
