SGA struggles with low participation

By Amrit Brown //

With the fall election in progress, the Student Government Association again is struggling with low participation.

Katie Stang, the SGA president, said that despite participation increasing since her freshman year, it is lower than she would like. “We’ve been putting active effort into increasing it, but it’s still below where we want it,” she said. 

If SGA gets all of the senators and class officers on the current ballot voted in, they will have a president, vice president, seven committee chairs, and six senators. The senior class council will have all four officers but the junior, sophomore and freshman classes will all be missing officers. 

Stang believes that participation in SGA is low because students don’t fully recognize its role or importance. “SGA is the voice of students on campus; we talk directly with staff and faculty members across the campus, as well as with the Senior Team and the Board of Trustees,” she said. “It’s through SGA that student-based issues can be passed up the chain to people who have the ability to enact the changes we want to see made.” 

Stang said she thinks that if more students recognized that SGA participation helps develop a voice for students and create change, participation would be higher.

“We’re also attempting to increase participation by hosting more events, such as the pool party that we had back in August, and by directly asking faculty members and other student leaders for recommendations of people who might be interested in joining SGA,” Stang said. 

SGA is working to increase participation. “Recently, our thought process to attempt to increase participation is to try and make it more visible what SGA is working on,” Stang said.

Stang said she believes that SGA cannot be fully effective without the help and support of the student body. “We want students to know that SGA is there for them; if you have an issue, you can tell us about it, and we’ll do our best to fix it,” she said. “We’re doing our best to tackle the issues we’ve recognized and prioritized, but the more involvement we have from the student body, the more improvements we can make.”

Each SGA committee has goals that it is working on. “Our exec board has noticed how there are a lot of areas of campus that are poorly lit, whether due to there being no lights or the lights that are there being broken,” Stang said. “Our safety committee and our facilities committee have thus decided to collaborate and work to find a solution.”