By Onika Davis, Senate Reporter
On Oct. 8, Student Senate met for their second meeting of the semester.
The meeting was called to order by Michaela Faith at noon, and began with a story about struggle and perseverance told by Eliana Mandarano.
After Mandarano gave the story that delivered the message of pursuing through hardships, Faith then introduced Lynn Atkins-Rykert and invited her to speak at the podium. Atkins-Rykert works alongside campus safety and spoke with the senate about several concerns both on and off campus for students.
Atkins-Rykert is not a mandated reporter for matters that students may bring to her in private and has a hand in training campus safety officers.
Several members of the senate expressed concerns with safety when it comes to sexual assault and violence, and asked Atkins-Rykert what precautions Aquinas College will be taking to assure students and faculty that we are in a safe environment. She responded that Aquinas College will be doing its best to bring awareness to sexual violence through participation in the Wear Purple Campaign and putting together a listening session on campus about what consent means to the people in our community.
The meeting transitioned into student senate bringing up concerns of treatment of students from campus safety. This included campus safety having a history of hanging up on students, not arriving in a timely manner for rideshares, if at all, and general dismissive attitude from select officers towards students. Atkins-Rykert was unaware of this behavior from campus safety and assured that she will be speaking with the team directly.
Before departing, Atkins-Rykert encouraged students to reach out to her with any examples of unconventional forms of sexual harassment that they would like her to address in the undated listening session. Ways to reach her are through phone: (616)780-6529 or email: atkinlyn@aquinas.edu.
The student senate then discussed concerns with parking and housing for the fall semester. With the influx of freshmen this year campus safety had sold out of parking passes and multiple students have been receiving tickets as a result. A proposed solution for this issue is having assigned specific parking spots per student rather than an entire lot.
Along with parking, there were complications regarding dorm and apartment assignments. Many reports have been given saying that housing conditions were poor upon move-in, and last minute arrangements made the process confusing and inconvenient.
Faith then announced their final topic for the meeting, which was addressing sustainability on campus. Due to numerous buildings not taking appropriate action with sorting recyclables, compostables and landfill waste, then the business that Aquinas College uses for their recycling collection will no longer be serving our campus if action is not taken to improve efforts. Ways for students to assist our center for sustainability are to be sure they are properly sorting their waste, attending informational meetings about recycling and putting forward their best effort of keeping our campus clean of litter.
With all topics to be discussed covered, Faith adjourned the meeting at 1:01 p.m.
