Student Association announced Monday that its long-awaited Wegmans bus program now has a start date of March 5.

This program, which SA’s Student Engagement Committee began planning during the spring semester, will run buses to the popular grocery store every other Saturday for two months beginning March 5, SA President Neal Casey said. The buses will shuttle students from College Place and South Campus to Wegmans for six and a half hours on each Saturday it runs, Student Life Committee chair Taylor Carr said.

SA members also discussed multiple other issues, including Syracuse University’s enrollment, student health and Spring Break buses.

Due to SU’s rising admission, students — with a priority on rising sophomores — will be able to live in university housing in the Sheraton University Hotel and Conference Center and Parkview Hotel in open doubles. Students who have already fulfilled their two-year university housing requirement will be able to live in University Village Apartments and the Park Point Syracuse apartment complex, Casey said.

‘This is a short-term solution,’ Casey said. ‘We’re going to have to keep looking for a long-term one.’

Space for about 300 SU students will open up in the SkyHall residence halls on South Campus when the new residence hall under construction for the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry is completed. Casey said SU is planning to turn many open doubles in SkyHall 3 into larger singles, which he said would appeal more to upperclassmen.

Casey and other SA members raised concerns about the logic of this decision and said it was counterintuitive in the face of the current squeeze for housing on campus.

Casey also announced that SA will form the Student Health Advisory Committee, which will work to tackle issues in any health area that might concern students. The committee also plans to expand the goals of the website, liveu.syr.edu, and apply them to students, Casey said. The university-run website is supposed to be a health and wellness resource for students.

‘One of our goals is to include students in key decisions, and decisions about health are definitely key decisions,’ Casey said.

Aside from the health issues, SA announced its customary schedule for Spring Break charter buses. The buses will make round trips to Boston, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. Tickets, which became available Monday, cost $99 for the round trip, and each bus has a capacity of 56 people. The buses will depart from Schine Student Center on March 11 at 5 p.m. and return from their respective locations Sunday, March 20, at 10 a.m., according to an SA press release.

Other business discussed:

• After receiving student complaints about littering on campus, the Student Life Committee is looking into placing new trash receptacles in areas where there are the highest volume of student traffic, said Preston Peters, a representative for the Martin J. Whitman School of Management.

• The Assembly elected Marion Araque, a senior international relations and policy studies major, to the Board of Elections and Membership.

• RideShark, an online ride-matching system, is set to be in place by Spring Break. Commercials for RideShark featuring Otto should appear soon, Casey said.

• SA is looking into working with the athletic department to get some SU football home games to take place in New Meadowlands Stadium in New Jersey.

• Redbox, a company that rents out movies via vending machines at low prices for a night, rejected SA’s proposal to set up a box on campus. The company said it was not looking to expand its college-campus program, said Carr, chair of the Student Life Committee. SA is now in its opening stages of inquiring about a similar program through Blockbuster, which could potentially provide the same service, Carr said.

spcotter@syr.edu

Published on January 31, 2011 at 12:00 pm