Crimson and Gold Connection; Hank Cloninger and Kolleen Gladden

Welcome to Crimson and Gold Connection, keeping you connected with the people and current events at Pittsburgh State University. This week on Crimson and Gold Connection, I am joined by Hank Kloninga and Colleen Gladden, who are President and Vice President of the Pittsburgh State University Student Government Association, better known as the SGA. Further 2016-17 academic year, welcome Hank and Colleen. Thank you. Thank you. For those of you who don't know the workings of the student body terribly well, could you explain to us a little bit about the Student Government Association, about the SGA, what is it, and what do you guys do? Well, Student Government Association is involved with pretty much everything on campus, as far as campus activities are concerned, student life. A lot of committees, they are on the Weapons Task Force Committee, the parking committees, the faculty senate, they go to those meetings, and of course we have our own meetings where we vote on resolutions for legislation that the student body wants, that we will go over to see if there's an issue on campus that we want to address. It will go through two readings before our senate, and they'll vote on it, and then it's usually a formal recommendation to the administration at Pitt State to do something about it, and oftentimes we're part of that solution.

But we're also very actively involved with community service, we do the big event each year, where the ones who put that community service event on each year, we just finished that up this year, and it was really successful. We do a lot of different things like that, we're involved with campus affairs, going around, making sure that there's lights on campus, whenever and start outside, making sure we have recycling machines, making sure we're participating in sustainability. There's just a lot of things that's really far reaching, and students can get involved with any areas on campus they want through SGA. Essentially our power is that we provide a voice for students to the administration. You're involved in pretty much every area, your student activity on the campus. Definitely. Yes. You've recently been elected, how do you get elected, and what were the kind of platforms that you stood on to be elected for this session? You stress out a lot. That's the first step.

Actually, you run a campaign that lasts about, there's not really a time limit on it, but the week before elections, everything except for social media goes dark, you have to take down any campaign signs, you can't spend more than $500. And you can basically go around and campaign to the student body, tell them your platforms, tell them to vote for you, a lot of things that normal politicians do. Then during the election week, people will go into their guest accounts and vote for who they think was the best. We had four parties this year, which was pretty unprecedented, I believe. Definitely. What were your particular platforms and the platforms on which you feel were successful in getting elected? Well, we had five, and we feel like all of them were pretty successful. People really liked a lot of them. They're a little complicated, but once we explained them to people, people really liked them. The easiest one was free printing. Free printing is no longer available on campus to a lot of departments. So using the guest print system that's already in place, we're hoping to get free printing back on campus. And we're looking into that of probably about 10 pages a day per student. That was a point that people really liked that they really wanted printing back again.

Concealed Carry coming to campus, July 1st, 2017, that's concerning to a lot of students. So we didn't want to polarize students on that. We wanted everyone to feel unified in that. So we took a stance of safety on that. The university should be offering safety courses for concealed carry, either in rest hall or anywhere else like theirs. There's already Hunter Safety offered here by Kansas Wildlife and Parks, so we feel like we would be able to partner with them and have them offer concealed carry courses, saying specifically what you should be aware of when carrying on campus. And as well as people who are against it, they could go to the classes also to be aware. But we would also have Alice training to some degree, possibly a class once a month, or along that time frame, just that students could voluntarily go to if they were interested. And we feel like students really liked that of just the idea of safety rather than telling people you should be for this or you should be against this. Another one we had was with online educational resources. There's a lot of access codes where you log on to your computer and log into a website, cost maybe $100 to $200 for this program you get for one semester. And it's just really expensive for not a lot. We're hoping to get faculty and staff away from that more so and lean more on to online educational resources that are cheaper or even free.

And a lot of those features are even available in Canvas or software that we already have and that we already pay fees for. So we're just hoping to limit cost of students in that regard. Our other two platforms are specialized degree programs. One of the main reasons that people who would normally attend Pitt State do not is because we don't offer the special degree that they want. So I've done some research with different academic advisors and we've been trying to find a way to take different departments and combine them and have specialized independent studies in order to create more specific degrees. We'll be doing a lot of research on that over the summer. Our final platform is Love Project, which is a 10 week student diversity program that would take place in the fall. We would bring in student speakers and have t-shirts and there would be kind of a system of random acts of kindness for different marginalized groups on campus. And at the end, the idea was to get more Americans involved with student diversity and get student diverse groups involved with each other. I just had a meeting regarding that yesterday and we're putting together a task force. So that's already in swing.

One of the aims of the SGA is to foster a culture of loyalty to the university. How do you guys feel about that? I think we can both agree that it's pretty vital to get our alumni to stay connected into the university. We both just got chosen to be in Crimson Club, which is an alumni relations group that works with the president. And so I think it's pretty clear that we both think it's important we want to facilitate as many off-campus connections as we can. Both of my parents were graduates of Pitt State and both of yours are as well, I believe. SGA works a lot also of working with faculty and staff. So a lot of them, world alumni, a lot of them are pretty passionate about Pitt State also. So just making sure that we have a healthy relationship with them and the alumni that they're working with also and helping them out. We talked a little bit about the issues on which you stood as a platform. So you see that you do have a role in terms of being active with current issues that are on campus and are hot issues with the student body. Absolutely. Definitely. Yeah, a lot of times with SGA people can get caught up in the procedure of it because we have our constitution, we have our deadlines so it can get really procedural and people get caught up in that more so.

Other administrations will get caught up in their platform so much that they will drop the ball and other things and committees won't get filled and we don't have as much representation there. So our goal with all that is to make sure we have people on all the committees we want to have committees represented for. But then also having people actually pursuing our platforms rather than just kind of getting through the laundry work of SGA for the year. Is there anything particular that you'd like to say to the student body and to our listening audience about the work of the SGA and what you hope to do in the year ahead? Well, the whole election process has been pretty insane. We had four parties which was never been done before. I believe the biggest voter turned out in over a decade. Maybe of all time is what they've been saying. It was just definitely wild to see how many people actually came out and were really passionate about SGA whereas other years it might not have been that way. And so we're really excited to take the platforms that people are passionate about and do as much as we can to get them. Yeah, we're hoping that people stay involved, stay involved with the process and stay interested with it and come to SGA meetings here what we're doing. Volunteer to help us out with different things and give us input throughout the whole thing is what they like that we're doing, what they don't like and what they want to see differently.

Hank Lonego, Colleen Gladden, thank you for joining us this morning and good luck in the future. Thank you. Join us for Crimson and Gold Connection Wednesdays at 850 and Fridays at 350.