The Associated Students Senate University Affairs Committee met in the Santa Barbara Mission Room to hear shared governance reports Tuesday evening.
Speakers included members from the Student Health Advisory Committee (SHAC) and the Faculty Executive Committee (FEC). The Student Affairs Committee also listened to reports from the Student Fee Advisory Committee (SFAC) about a bill to create the Code of Conduct for Associated Students.
The SFAC chair and fourth-year economics and accounting major Sean McKenzie said their group is separate from A.S. and is composed of 12 voting members, including two sophomores, two juniors, two seniors, two grad reps, two faculty and two staff representatives.
“We are a committee under the Student Affairs Department, so we have nothing to do with Associated Students at all, even though we have Associated Students as our Ex-Officio Advisory members,” McKenzie said.
According to McKenzie, the SFAC hears out public requests for departments for one-time projects such as maintenance requests, student health requests and more.
“In Fall we open up public requests for those departments like the MultiCultural Center, the Rec Center, CAPS — there’s a whole list on our website actually,” McKenzie said. “So they come in [and] in the Fall they request money from us. We have a pot every year of money — it’s $285,000 each year, that’s based on a percentage of the student services fee. So based on that money, the Committee will allocate to these departments based on if they see fit whether they are going to improve the student life basically.”
McKenzie also said all UC’s have a SFAC, and they meet up at various locations every quarter to work on campaigns.
The Chair of the Senate Affairs Committee and second-year political science major Cassandra Mancini said SHAC had a meeting last Tuesday discussing the new meningitis vaccine, which would require three shots.
“Last year, 50 percent of the student body got both shots, so that’s pretty cool. We’re very protected against Meningitis,” Mancini said. “But this new vaccine is not recommended — or you don’t have to get it if you got last year’s one — but, it would be good for new students and transfer students to get. So we will be offering that.”
According to Mancini, the new vaccine will cost money, but the amount is currently unknown.
“It’ll just be in the Student Health Office, so anyone can get it at any time — it’s also not free like it was last year,” Mancini said. “They didn’t mention how much it costs. But also, I don’t know if insurance will cover it until next year, so that’s something that we might have to start talking about pretty soon.”
According to Mancini, the cost of getting the flu shot is rising, and there will be an official meeting on Gaucho Health Insurance (GHI) next Thursday.
“The costs of flu shots is being increased from $20-$30 for non-Gaucho Health Insurance people, and we talked about whether that was prohibitive or not,” Mancini said.
Mancini said the distance criteria will be extended to approximately 50 miles next year in order to include students who have Kaiser health insurance, which is currently not a sufficient alternative health care providers according to current GHI stantards, though MediCal students would still be denied.
“Kaiser students can easily get waived,” Mancini said. “So that will be great for students because that was a big issue this year. Us and Santa Cruz are the only UC’s that didn’t have a Kaiser within a close distance.”
FEC student representative and fourth year student Nikka Kurland said the Faculty Committee’s responsibilities include collecting information from end-of-the-quarter course assessments.
“They review self-assessments from different departments and kind of like approve name changes [of] the department names like changes of majors and things like that,” Kurland said. “All the little surveys that you guys fill out at the end of each quarter, like ranking the classes and stuff, basically that information does get compiled and people actually do look at it, and people actually take it very, very seriously.”
A.S. Senator Matthew Santos presented an amendment to add a second policy called “A Bill to Create the Code of Conduct for Associated Students” on to policy one in the A.S. Senate Bill.
“Policy one would be created as the actual code of conduct with the A.S., all elected officials and the five bullets underneath,” Santos said. “The amendment that I would propose creates policy two under that.”
Mancini said the Code of Conduct had previously been voted on and approved by the Senate, but that the second policy in need of approval included the travel agreement under the five points for elected officials, appointed officials, general members and employees of A.S.
According to Santos, the agreement would promote “professionalism, civility, respect and courtesy.”
“We would just call that the A.S. Code of Conduct Travel Agreement… voted upon by the Senate, specific for traveling to events,” Santos said.