Sinclar’s Community College is home to many different offices and organizations. One that hardly ever gets talked about is Student Senate. Student Senate is an advocacy group that acts as the voice of students to create change. Each student senator represents and advocates for the challenges that are brought together by their own student body. AJ Owen, a student support coordinator at Sinclair, is currently working with Community Engagement to relaunch Student Senate.
“We tried to reinstitute or relaunch Student Senate it had been gone away for a while, but we tried to relaunch it in 2016. I don’t know if it was a lack of interest or support. The way we had structured it that the institution had just come out with career communities, which had been around for a long time,” Owen said.
in 2016 the Senate was structured in accordance with career communities throughout Sinclair college. According to Owen students have the right to belong to any career community in some way no matter what. Sinclair tries matching students with communities associated with their career path.
“We decided that we were going to have clubs nominate or elect, or however they wanted to do it. We didn’t want to get into the weeds as far as dictating how clubs would send someone to serve on the senate,” Owen Said.
Owen believes that it should be up to the clubs to decide how many members should be involved in the Senate. The clubs themselves will have the governing power to decide how they should go about nominating individuals to serve as a senator. Back when the Student Senate was still functioning, there were limits on the number of students who could serve. Now it depends on the number of clubs and organizations.
“That was in the past, it depends on how many active clubs and organizations we have. Each club and organization has a seat on the senate. If a club dissolves and is no longer active that seat, then disappears. It’s more of a floating thing,” Owen Said.
The reason why there were limits on members is because some clubs might tend to have a say over the others. It would be unfair if one group or organization told people how Student Senate should be run. Being open to new ideas is a quality students should have to be a part of Student Senate.
Kyle Mounce.
Writer, and reporter.