Student Association Vice President Jessica Cunnington announced possible plans during Monday night’s meeting to vote on a resolution that would create steps to implement a smoke-free campus initiative in the future. 

Cunnington is organizing a committee to draft the resolution, which would have to be approved by the SA cabinet for the Assembly to vote on at next Tuesday’s meeting. The resolution would lay out the four goals SA hopes to accomplish with the smoke-free initiative over time, Cunnington said.

But the resolution would not immediately be put into effect, and there is no timetable for implementing the goals. Cunnington gave the example of banning smoking 25 feet away from campus buildings as one of the first goals.

‘The first step is going to be the most important, and the goal is to have it done as soon as possible,’ she said.

At the meeting, SA members also discussed developing a program that gives incentives to student groups for doing good work. The eligibility of a student to become the Assembly representative of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications was debated as well.

An SA member will tweet from the New York State Tobacco-Free College Conference on Tuesday in hopes of getting student opinion on topics the conference covers, Cunnington said. The conference will be held from 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel and Conference Center.

This conference has also taken place in New York City, Albany and Buffalo, but Syracuse’s conference is specific to tobacco-free programs on college campuses, Cunnington said.

SA plans to announce in detail its plans for the smoke-free campus initiative in about a month, she said.

Separate from the smoke-free campus initiative, SA also discussed plans to create a program to recognize student groups for their good work, SA President Neal Casey said. The program will have a nomination process and provide some kind of incentive or reward for a group’s efforts. SA will need to create qualifications for what it considers ‘good work,’ Casey said.

Casey said SA also needs to decide what sort of incentives it will offer the groups. The incentives will not have anything to do with funding from SA for programs but rather something along the lines of money for a pizza party, Casey said as an example.

During Monday’s meeting, the Assembly also debated whether or not Perry Russom, a sophomore broadcast journalism and political science dual major, was eligible to run for the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications Assembly representative.

When someone declares a dual major before he or she has finished sophomore year, the person’s ‘home school’ is considered whichever college is older. This posed an issue when Russom wanted to run for the Assembly representative for Newhouse because his home school is the College of Arts and Sciences.

But it doesn’t mention anywhere in SA’s codes that a student’s home school should determine which college he or she represents, SA Parliamentarian Alex Hemsley said. SA’s codes are ambiguous about this issue because the codes probably existed before the dual major option did, Hemsley said.

Hemsley also said Russom identifies more with Newhouse than the College of Arts and Sciences, allowing for the Assembly to elect Russom to the position.

Hemsley and others will look at the codes and see if they need to be changed to mirror the Assembly’s ideas when dealing with future cases like this one.

Other business discussed:

• The Assembly elected Lucia Ha, a freshman chemistry major; Lynde Folsom, a freshman neuroscience major; and Jennifer Osias, a sophomore political science and international relations major, as Assembly representatives of the College of Arts and Sciences.

• The Assembly elected Assel Baitassova, a freshman computer science major, as an Assembly representative of the L.C. Smith College of Engineering.

• SA plans to begin posting regular reports from its committees on a blog people can access from the current SA website, said Eileen Clark, SA’s communications director.

• SA will host its first town hall meeting in Lawrinson Hall on Friday, Feb. 11, at 4 p.m., said Jen McKay, chair of the Student Engagement Committee.

spcotter@syr.edu

Published on February 7, 2011 at 12:00 pm