On Sept. 21 The Associated Students of Fort Lewis College discussed FLC’s proposed new mission statement and debated plans for cutting registered student organization budgets.
Fort Lewis College: The New Mission Statement
The ASFLC always starts their agenda by giving outside participants the opportunity to voice their opinions or ask questions.
Five concerned FLC students spoke in dissent of the college’s decision to take out “liberal arts” from the mission statement.
All the guest student speakers said they attended FLC mainly for the liberal arts education offered.
“I think that it is a very distinctive quality of our school,” Adam Hamilton, FLC senior and guest speaker at the meeting, said. “We are the only public liberal arts school in Colorado, and I think we should hold on to that.”
Connor Cafferty, FLC student body president, sent an email to the student body on Tuesday asking for input on the new mission statement via survey.
The email contains the proposed mission statement as well as the old mission statement, Cafferty said. The deadline for completing the student survey is Friday, Sept. 23.
The ASFLC is encouraging students to take the survey linked in the email which is only one question, he said.
The Strategic Plan Committee collaborated on the mission statement and agreed they wanted a more general statement, but they will refine it by narrowing it down with official core values and learning outcomes, Glenna Sexton, The ASFLC advisor and vice president of Student Affairs, said.
“One thing that is very important in a mission statement to get across is the culture of the school and why a student might want to go to that school,” Sean Conte, FLC senior and guest speaker at the meeting, said.
Senate agreed they need to wait for the results of the student survey in order to truly address the changes regarding the mission statement.
The Strategic Plan Committee does not know exactly when the mission statement will officially change, but they ideally want the decision made by next fall, Sexton said.
Michael Watchmen, senator for The ASFLC, encouraged senators to speak to their classes about the survey, so that the school can get proper student input about this change.
RSO Budget Cuts: No Final Decisions
The ASFLC is proposing three plans for how to cut RSO budgets given the $10,000 budget deficit, Harrison Thrasher, The ASFLC senator, said.
The first budget cut plan is to leave intact the travel and event grants for RSO I’s, which are FLC’s least funded student organizations, and to simply cut RSO II’s and III’s, Thrasher said.
Another option would be to cut the travel and event grant fund by 6.5 percent in order to lessen the financial impact on RSO II’s and III’s, he said.
The final option would be to cut the event and travel grant fund by 10 percent, he said.
In an informal vote, The ASFLC is in favor of cutting the travel and event grants by 6.5 percent.
If FLC had higher enrollment there would be more money from student activity fees to cover these organizations, Cafferty said.
“Going forward, and going to the Institutional Fee Review Board, we need to be thinking how much do we want to raise this student activity fee to fund RSOs and why,” he said.
Next Week:
Senate will bring an official RSO budget to the meeting where final decisions will be made.
9/22 Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Glenna Sexton as the president of Student Affairs. It has be corrected to reflect her position as the vice president of Student Affairs
9/29 Update: At the time the interview with Cafferty took place, the survey was only one question. It has now been updated with two questions.