SGA President Elliot Spillers will introduce a constitutional amendment to revise the block seating process at tonight’s senate meeting.
The bill, obtained by The Crimson White, would codify a ‘board of governors’ under the SGA vice president for student affairs, made up of nine voting members and one representative of the SGA judiciary. The bill also features the first reference to a full-time ‘SGA Advisor,’ who will select a committee to choose the voting members of the board of governors. The judiciary member will be chosen by the SGA chief justice.
The bill would allocate block seating based on a two-part evaluation, similar to the current process. Under the new amendment, however, each portion of the evaluation will be equally weighted, unlike the current model.
Under the new model, 50 percent of the evaluation will be derived solely from each organization’s GPA. Each organization will be asked to submit a list of names and CWIDs for GPA verification. The GPAs submitted will be averaged to develop an organizational GPA, using cumulative GPA from the preceding spring semester. According the bill, “this list need not include all members of the organization. Rather, the number of seats for which an organization is eligible shall be equal to the number of members submitted, multiplied by 1.5.” The submission is limited to 120 students.
The remaining 50 percent will be derived from a presentation to the board of governors, describing each organization’s commitment to leadership, education, diversity and “other relevant factors.” Those presentations will be evaluated separately by each member of the board, then will be averaged to produce a score for each organization.
The amendment limits block seating to organizations that are SOURCE recognized as of the last day of the preceding spring semester before each football season. Every applying organization will be required to sign a contract agreeing to a code of conduct. According to the bill “conduct violations shall take two forms: behavioral violations and failure to adequately fill seats. Both shall be outlined in the contract to be signed at the end of the spring semester.” The contract will give the board of governors the authority to revoke block seating at any time, should an organization fail to fill its allotted seats.
The amendment will likely clear up controversy surrounding block seating that arose from an SGA judiciary decision in the fall, when the judiciary struck down the block seating chart by relying on a process that looked to have never passed senate.
The bill would require a 2/3 majority from the senate. If the senate passes the amendment, it will become a campus-wide referendum on the SGA ballot on March 1.
