Student Senate Update

Your senate appreciates the input you made Tuesday, Nov. 3. We successfully held our first Monthly Open Forum to which different students came to do the talking. We invite you to continue strengthening your senate through making use of the forum to address your concerns. As our first monthly open forum developed, we saw students coming to actively participate. Among them, the following were the issues you talked about. Now it is our great honor to address them.

The Student Senate will form the Food Council to discuss concerns about the caf. The council will contain caf workers, so worker conditions can be addressed as well. In addition, the Food Council will help respond to the comments on the caf board. This council will be started before Thanksgiving.

A group of social work majors attended the forum with a specific concern: handicap accessibility. This group of students has been working on a change project since last spring semester. They say that all Luther buildings are ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) up-to-date, except Towers and the CFL. However, they consider that the ADA guidelines are vague. They have talked to other schools, and other campuses make improvements for disabilities every year. At Luther College, said one of the students, “There is no budget for handicap accessibility improvements.” As part of their solutions, they decided to concentrate their efforts in the cafeteria; specifically they are working on the revolving door at the exit of the caf.

The group sent out a survey, and only nine out of 51 agreed the CAF is acceptable for accessibility. As part of their efforts to make the change, they are working on a grant in their social work class. In addition, the Student Senate, through its Head of Campus Betterment (Mitch Demers) agreed to work on the issue together with the respective administrative members and the student body interested.

Next we heard concerns from Erik Halvorson (‘11) and Allison Dahlberg (‘11) in regards to Study Abroad/Financial Aid policy. Their concerns lie in the fact that modern language majors are required to study abroad but receive no financial aid for their experience. Because there is no Luther-based program for languages such as French or Spanish, students majoring in these languages must search outside of Luther programs, where financial aid will not follow, giving up their financial aid. At Luther, education majors/minors receive financial aid from Luther to their outside program, while non-majors are not allowed that option. Solutions to this problem are under investigation with the Academic Planning committee

Lastly, we would like to invite all students and staff to Student Senate’s Fall Forum on “Credit Building: How it affects You!” Thursday Nov.19 at 7 p.m. in Olin 102. Issues addressed include: how to build credit, what is a credit score and risks of misusing credit cards. Guest speakers will be Craig Rabe and Jim Morrow; the forum will be very informative with plenty of time to ask your questions. We hope to continue seeing you at our meetings and our upcoming forum. Your concerns, ideas and suggestions are what matter and make us be a representative student senate.