The executive board of the Student Association is ready to forgive and learn from the conflicts and controversies of last semester and start the new year with a clean slate.
At the close of the spring semester, Elahd Bar-Shai, this year’s assembly chair, made racial comments toward last year’s SA Vice President for Finance Alice Liou in the SA office during an argument on April 26. After quorum was broken during an April 27 Assembly meeting, police were called following a series of racial slurs exchanged between three Assembly members. Bar-Shai was not involved on April 27.
This dispute caused the Assembly to hold a re-vote for the assembly chair position during the following weeks, though Bar-Shai had already been elected. The year ended with Bar-Shai retaining his elected position as assembly chair for the 2009-10 school year despite the previous controversies.
“When Elahd was officially elected last year, after all of the internal Assembly issues were sorted out, we still had the issue of what was said hanging over everyone’s head,” SA President Adam Amit said.
Amit, along with the other e-board members, have decided not to dwell on the past but to move on and create a strong foundation for the SA to start the new school year.
“We sat down as an e-board, a family and a team,” he said. “We will have each other’s back and support each other. This is a ‘forgive and not forget’ situation. We recognize that it happened, but we will take it as a learning experience. He [Bar-Shai] feels terrible that this situation ever happened, but we are putting it behind us. Here on out we will work together like a family.”
Ricky DaCosta, vice president for multicultural affairs, agrees that by starting new this year and treating each other like “a family,” the SA will be able to accomplish more throughout the semester.
“I’ve been speaking with cultural groups during the summer and I think the fresh approach that is being taken is slowly able to win over even the greatest skeptics,” he said.
In order to keep the e-board and the Assembly all working together like a team, the e-board created a code of conduct, including a conflict-of-interest policy and an office behavior policy. The document is set to be signed by all e-board members by next week.
“We want everyone on the e-board and in the Assembly, including Elahd, to feel like they are a family,” Amit said. “In terms of our e-board, the rules’ code of conduct explains that we will always support each other, and not do anything to undermine each other.”
According to Amit, the repercussions of breaking the code-of-conduct will be based on the situation that arises. E-board members have agreed to certain stipulations, like eliminating shouting matches at meetings. When those situations do arise, Amit said, the member or members involved will be asked to leave the meeting, and he will speak with them on a one-on-one basis to resolve the issue.
Within the Assembly, Bar-Shai will continue to follow Robert’s Rules, a universal set of parliamentary procedures at the meetings.
“If someone does do something that creates a problem I will have little tolerance and they will be ejected from the room,” Bar-Shai said. “I have limited authority of the individual behavior of the assembly members, but hopefully working with the executive board we can prevent conflict that will lead to the breaking of quorum, but that is a part of any government that is hard to avoid.”
Bar-Shai also said that it looks like the executive and legislative branches of the SA will be working very well together this year, and Amit echoed the sentiment. The latter said that the SA provides services to every student, and more than 180 groups.
“The SA is for every student … We plan to focus on the students’ wants in order to increase group membership involvement and programming that goes on across campus. We want to make the SA as student-oriented as possible,”Amit said.