September 19, 2019
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MINUTES For the 5th Meeting of the 33rd Session 19 September 2019 Room 201 9:00pm – Cowles Library I. Call to Order – 9:00pm II. Roll Call III. Approval of Minutes A. Motion to Approve by Senator Springsteen B. Seconded by Senator Johnson C. Motion Carries IV. Amendments to the Agenda A. None V. Student Body President Report – Nicholas Johnston A. Introduction of Guests and Proxies a. Cassidy Barnes, Fermata the Blue b. Ben Jaeger, Fermata the Blue c. Danielle Green, Director of the Counselling Center d. Alex Reznicek, Drake Men’s Soccer Club B. J-term Housing/Caucuses a. I’m going to let Senator Trees handle a little more about this, but we are moving fast on an awesome new project to hopefully give first-year students the ability to be in upper-class halls during J-term if they want to be on a caucus project. They will have a once in a lifetime opportunity to do it, it won’t come again, so we’re working on it. I’ll let Senator Trees take a little more on that if he wants to in his report. C. First-Year Senator Election a. That is next week. I continue to have about six emails a day with the online balloting administrator. Imagine customer service but over email instead of on the phone. I am optimistic we will get the ballot working; I’ll be transparent, it’s not fully ready to go right now. Our problem is we are able to add everyone with the first year designation by credit; unfortunately, not all first-years have that designation because some have enough credits to be considered sophomores. What we have to do is get access to the first-time student designation which I am still kicked out of. b. Just so we are all clear, because of our rules and regulations, we don’t have election co-chairs. Instead, we have the executive officers who will be serving as election commissioners. We already are members of the election commission; we’re just only supposed to vote if we have to meet quorum. Because we are the only one’s on the commission, we do in fact have to vote to meet quorum and we have to carry out the duties of it. Hopefully you have no objections to that, if you do, let us know, we’ll see if we can work something else out. Obviously, even if we get an election commissioner for next meeting, it won’t be in time to administer any election responsibilities. D. October Board of Trustees a. That will be the first week of October on October 5th. If you are a designee to the Board of Trustees, hopefully you were able to attend last time as a sort of transition meeting. You will be getting some sort of information in the next week or so I would assume. I haven’t gotten materials yet but I believe we will have those by next week. I believe there’s two senators, Senator Springsteen and Senator Hutchison, serve on the Board of Trustees, just by virtue of their position and committees that line up with that. If you don’t get materials soon, let me know. V. Administrative Report – Associate Dean of Students Joe Campos A. I don’t really have anything for you all other than keep up the good work and everybody be cool. VI. Treasurer’s Report – Treasurer Nate Wright A. Elected Assembly Follow-up a. Hello everybody, just a quick follow up from our Elected Assembly last night. You’ve had a day to figure it out, if you think about anything, shoot me an email, talk to me at my office hours or talk to me after this. Do what you got to do. I am happy to answer any questions, comments or concerns that you have. I did whip together a little spreadsheet that Senator Koch requested. If you take a look in our shared folder under the FUNding folder, it will be in there. If you want to look at funding motions ahead of time, I try to put those in there as soon as I get them. B. Bylaw Changes a. I have two little sections I want to change in one motion. Hopefully you guys are on board, I think they are definitely for the better. We’ll see what you guys think. C. SDF Update a. We currently sit at $44,820.02; if we approve our one motion tonight, we will deplete it to $44,754.20. VII. Speakers A. Danielle Green | Director, Counseling Center| Broadlawns Partnership & Updates a. On July 1st, Broadlawns and Drake entered into a merger to have Broadlawns oversee the clinic. What that meant was day-to-day operations are still under student affairs and Dean of Students Jerry Parker, but then Broadlawns oversees all the clinical things. I was appointed the director and got to hire all new staff. We have all new staff at the counselling center. We have Carla and Amber right now and then I am interviewing for a part time person that I hope will start in October. We also have an intern that will start mid-October; she interned with us in the spring semester and wants to be here for the entire year. Some of the changes that we did right away was we updated all of our forms. Our forms were really out of date, they didn’t have pronouns, on them, we didn’t have a lot of different identifiers on them, so we updated those. We now have pronoun pins at the check in desk to be used on either the mental health side or the medical side. We ask that you return them, but if you want to keep it and wear it around campus for advertising, that would be cool too. We have a high traffic, so we have a lot of folks coming in; we’re able to get people in either the same week or early the next week. Some of that really depends on people’s availability; I know all our schedules are really busy so sometimes people will call and say they can only meet on a Tuesday and we may not be able to work like that. We’re trying to get people in really quickly and have no waiting list. If it’s an emergency, we are telling students that they can walk over. We’ve had the most walk-ins over the last two weeks than we did all last year. We are noticing that and so if you need that support, we are happy to do that. The counselling center is still set up to be briefer crisis intervention, supportive; so, if we believe that the student we’re meeting with needs a community provider, we’re going to help with that. That doesn’t mean we’re going to give you a business card and say “deuces, good luck,” it means we’re going to help you call your insurance to make sure that is a covered service and help you call that provider to get that appointment set up and then we’ll also send a background story to that provider. You’ll still have to tell your story, but you won’t have to go into the depths of everything right away. We’re trying to have a warmer, softer hand off so folks aren’t having to do that on their own. We are looking in the future to have online scheduling through Starfish, hopefully spring semester we will have that. People can also request meetings with us or if you want to have us come do trainings, we are really involved on campus. We are partnering with Drake Rise Up for suicide prevention training in October. The counselling center is more than happy to come talk on your floor or to your student org about topics you want to know more about. Hopefully we’ll have some walk in times maybe; it’s been eye opening these last couple of weeks to have so many walk-ins. I’m thinking we might just have sometimes for people to just walk- in and that can be for briefer, crisis, emergency things and then we can schedule longer appointments later down in the week. Hopefully we’ll get some groups going in the spring as well, such as some support groups for anxiety and self-care. I was in Carpenter Hall on Tuesday doing some self-care, so I’m happy to do small things like that throughout the week. I’m trying to say, if we can’t do something, it’s a “No, but…”. I’m not just going to say no, that’s not available. We want to be supportive, and I really want to hear from you all too if you have questions and feedback or suggestions. This is only good if it’s a service that you are utilizing and if you feel it’s supportive of you all. 1. Senator Binion: I know you mentioned support groups about anxiety, is there anything in terms of support groups for grief? a. Yes, we are hoping to partner with Every Step which is a community provider in Des Moines that specializes in grief. They came in November and did a group for us and they have been receptive to doing that in the future. I think as long as we can demonstrate our need, even one or two people would be enough to justify that.