SGA Covers Homecoming, Safety App

To go over the upcoming homecoming events, campus safetly app, the no zebras no excuses event and the school year long senator competition, the student government association held their second monthly meeting in Dillard 101. The meeting featured guest speakers: Keith Lamb in place of Racheal Fornof, and Patrick Coggins while Mario Ramirez was listed as a guest speaker but was unable to attend.

Patrick Coggins, chief of police, was the first speaker in the meeting. He spoke to the audience about the campus safety app and explained the different features, such as Mobile BlueLight, and a similar feature Friend Walk. Friend Walk uses global positioning technology that allows users to virtually track/monitor, or in this case walk their friends to a location safely.

“If you’re leaving Dillard and you want to walk back to Legacy Hall but you feel a little bit concerned for whatever reason, you would enlist the help of a friend using friend walk. That friend would be able to monitor you with gps along your route once you get to that location and if you don’t arrive to that location, they can see why you haven’t arrived, what your last location was and notify the police,” Coggins said. “We don’t have staffing at this time to do a friend walk and us be the ones to watch you walk but this is still a tool you can use with one of your friends and your college roommates or whatever the case is to help track you get across campus.”

Later on in the meeting, Keith Lamb talked to the audience about No Zebras, No Excuses, a program dealing with sexual violence prevention. This program also kicks off the senator competition the student government association has created this fall.

“No Zebras, No excuses is a program that really has to do with with bystander intervention, has to do with healthy relationships, it uses like multiple vignettes I guess you would say so like, different plays, different roles, and uses multiple vignettes to try to educate individuals on bystander intervention largely, you see this program in a number of different schools around the country and the US Navy uses it exclusively for their training right so it’s really an interesting good program and I continue to attend if you can,” Keith Lamb said.

Ellie Gunderson, SGA president and political science senior said, the purpose of the senator competition is have higher percentages of different organizations participating in events they may not have attended before the competition started.

“The point of a senator competition that we have started this semester, is to get higher percentages of different organizations out to other events that they might not have attended before this competition started and at the end of every month, we will have a senator of the month and that will go towards the senator of the year award that will be awarded in the spring,” Gunderson said.

One student found the meeting to be informative.

Emily Geibe, respiratory senior said, “They were all interesting, I think having the chief of police [come to the meeting] was really interesting because I didn’t know we had that app so it’s really cool and know that friend walk really does work, that makes students feel better and safer on campus.”