The Student Senate will finish the final half of the Speaker election at their meeting Wednesday in the Arcola/Tuscola room of the Martin Luther King Jr. University Union at 7 p.m.

Last week’s meeting was only for nominations, but now Senators will vote on who they feel the next Speaker of the Senate should be.

The only person running for Speaker of the Senate is Seth Yeakel, a senior math and computer science major. If he wins, he will be the person to run the rest of the meetings for the semester.

The executive board members will be giving information about what they have been working on after the speaker nominations.

This will also be the Senate’s first time hearing from the committee chairs to talk about the programs and ideas that they have for the semester.

Student Body President Carson Gordon has been pushing mental health awareness and said she has plans for the near future.

Gordon said she will be meeting with the Health Education Resources Center to collaborate on some events for the semester. Nothing is set in stone yet, but she said they will be meeting soon to go over details for the semester.

Gordon is also in the process of reaching out to other RSOs to see if they would want to get involved and come up with some mental health projects as well.

The Student Body Election is also in the works right now; the election starts in March. 

“Packets will start coming out in the next couple of weeks,” Gordon said. “The main thing is there is a lot of different people that have to look through the packets and verify the dates.”

Gordon said she is meeting with Election Commissioner Ethan Osborne on Wednesday and Feb. 12 to get plans about the election. 

“It’s one of those hard things with student government,” Gordon said. “We have so many different levels that we have to go through, so it takes so long before we can officially announce it. Once we get the announcement out there that means it’s completely planned and it’s ready to go.”

For the new members that will be coming in next semester, the recent members will try to help them as much as they can to get them familiarized with their position.

An application for student senators can be found online on the Senate’s website under “applications.”

A note on the Senate’s website encouraged students to attend senate meetings and introduce themselves to the senate and to speak to the speaker of the senate about becoming a senator.

Jelan Buchanan can be reached at 581-2812 or jjbuchanan@eiu.edu