As the summer weather rolls into Eugene, out go the thoughts of educational productivity and persistence. Yet for student government, summer marks the beginning of a new term.
Every other week, six ASUO senators meet in the EMU’s Walnut Room to process special requests and discuss plans for the upcoming school year.
Despite the low expectations associated with summer-term student government, ASUO Summer Senate President Matthew Miyamoto@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=student&d=person&b=name&s=Matthew+Miyamoto+@@ remains optimistic and is looking to clean a few things up after a rather tumultuous year.
The first area of focus for senate will be to find any rules that may need to be changed or taken out — and perhaps to add any additional ones. The advantage of doing this during the summer is so all of the senators can hit the ground running fall term.
“We’ll save the rules committee a great amount of time if we can propose a solid list of amendments to them as soon as the year begins,” Miyamoto said.
Providing the rules committee an entire year to go over an organized list of rules that need adjustment — as opposed to leaving everything up to them — is an efficiency he wants to stress.
The second area of focus has to do with outreach: getting students involved and interested.
“Since summer senate precedes the matriculation of freshman and transfer students at the University (of Oregon), I think that we can come up with a solid plan of outreaching to new students,” he said. “We can also collaborate to find new ways to outreach to students (who) are currently unaware that the ASUO exists.”
Overall, student involvement is not as high as he would like to see because there are still students who are unaware of the ASUO or do not know why they should get involved. Gaining the student’s trust back will be an uphill battle — especially after last year’s debacle — but it is something that Miyamoto thinks is very important and necessary.
His third area of focus is something he labeled “summer projects.” His idea for this is to include any ideas that do not fit within the two previous areas of focus.
“This could include things like ideas to make the ASUO’s website more direct and accessible, progress on last year’s over-realized spendings, details regarding the EMU referendum and other referendums that may be appearing in the fall,” he said.
Despite a lot of work to be done if these areas of focus are to become successful, Miyamoto still seems determined despite the heavy workload.