Student Body President Levi Bulgar wants more campus unity.

He said he would work with faculty this year to incorporate Blue Crew and the School Spirit Committee more and wants the Student Supreme Court to be a more prominent organization.

Student Senate held its first meeting of the semester Wednesday night.

Eric Wilber, student executive vice president, said he would have two events to get students registered to vote in the upcoming weeks.

The first one will be a Rock the Vote event on Sept. 17 and the second will be during Latino Heritage Month on Oct. 6.

“Last election, we got 4,500 students registered and 2,000 actually voted,” Wilber said. “I want to see what we can get done this election.”

Wilber said he would be going to the state and local government classes this week to get people to join Student Action Team as well.

Student Action Team is where students lobby for laws down in Springfield – they will have their first meeting sometime next week.

Wilber said political science professor Jeffrey Ashley would be giving extra credit to students who go to Springfield with the team.

Tiffany Turner, student vice president for student affairs, announced the senate’s budget is around $28,000 this year. She added she was thinking about discussing the budget with finance and accounting teachers sometime in the future.

Ryan Kerch, student vice president for student affairs, discussed student surveys distributed during the First Night celebration.

The surveys revealed the T-shirts distributed during the event turned out to be a hit with the students.

He said the student senate received 289 surveys from students about Sunday’s First Night celebration that determined the students enjoyed the t-shirts more than anything else at the event.

In addition, even though student senate was worried about the time change of First Night, Kerch said the survey showed support for the change, which moved the start time to 8 p.m. instead of 11 p.m.

“Because of sports requirements, classes being the next day and other circumstances, faculty thought a change in time would be good, and we weren’t sure how students would react to this but they accepted the change,” Kerch said.

David Maurer, a retired professor of history at Eastern, talked to the senate about how he wanted Eastern to open a day care at Eastern for parents to utilize.

“This can be for traditional students, non-traditional students or faculty members and they can either be married or single parents,” Maurer said.

He said he wanted the senate to pass this idea on to the faculty at Eastern. He said he had proposed it before but had been turned down.

Student government will also have an orientation meeting for students on Sept. 7 that will highlight vacant chair positions.

Heather Holm can be reached at 581-7942 or haholm@eiu.edu.

Retired professor David Maurer addresses the Student Senate on Wednesday evening in regards to opening a day care program for faculty and students with children which Maurer thinks will greatly benefit the university. Student Senate met for the first time

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