After months of delay and 2 1/2 weeks of campaigning, Hannah Taylor and Noah Schindler were elected president and vice president of the Associated Students of Colorado State University Sept. 16.
Taylor and Schindler sat down with CTV Channel 11’s Alexandria Cullen Oct. 1 to discuss their new positions and their priorities in the first weeks of their administration.
“We really do want to stress the importance of addressing those student concerns right now because we know that they’re there,” Taylor said. “And we want to make sure that we are affecting students positively during this experience and impacting it to try to make it better.”
Taylor said their top priority that will continue throughout their administration is to create a COVID-19 relief fund and provide students with more access to thermometers, masks and hand sanitizer.
“I think the most important out of those three things as far as accessibility goes … is definitely thermometers,” Taylor said. “Because thermometers are more expensive for students, and if a student does not have a thermometer, then they’re not accurately filling out their symptom checker, or they’re not doing it.”
Schindler added that as long as the symptom checker is a requirement for students to complete before going to campus, ensuring that students can properly record their symptoms will be their main focus.
To create a COVID-19 relief fund, Taylor and Schindler plan to work with different departments in ASCSU and across the University to find funds left over from last year that were not used and could instead be redistributed to students through the Office of Financial Aid.
“So without students actually being active in the voice, we can’t correctly represent them, so any outreach that we can do is extremely important.” -Noah Schindler, ASCSU vice president
Taylor said she spoke with the former student body president at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who worked to create a relief fund for students at their university.
Examples of the funds that could be used are ones that were reserved for traveling or events that were not able to happen due to the pandemic, Taylor said.
“We think that the students (who) paid their student fees last year, they should be still impacted now,” Taylor said. “They shouldn’t just be sitting in a reserve fund for years and years and years. And we really want to work, not only with our own budget, but also in other departments at CSU to see what money is left over from what was not spent last semester.”
Those funds, both Taylor and Schindler explained, would be given to the Office of Financial Aid to distribute to students who submit applications, similar to the scholarship process on campus.
Schindler said it would not be up to their administration to distribute the funds because they do not have experience doing that. Additionally, Taylor said it would be a conflict of interest for students to decide which other students receive the funding.
Transparency across all of ASCSU is another focus for the Taylor-Schindler administration, along with general education about ASCSU as a whole.
Taylor said she plans to have monthly fireside chats or press releases posted on social media to discuss the money that has been spent and the projects each department has worked on.
“We really want to work, not only with our own budget, but also in other departments at CSU to see what money is left over from what was not spent last semester.”-Hannah Tayolr, ASCSU president
They also plan to create a Canvas page for ASCSU that will show up on every student’s Canvas, alerting them to how ASCSU works and what it does each week. Schindler said they want to do this on Canvas because students access it every single day, unlike RAMweb.
“Unlike most colleges here in the U.S., we have an extreme amount of responsibility and power as students that is just unprecedented in most places,” Schindler said. “And the importance there is huge, so without students actually being active in the voice, we can’t correctly represent them, so any outreach that we can do is extremely important.”
To hear the Taylor-Schindler administration’s plan for creating an inclusive environment within ASCSU, working with the City of Fort Collins on issues important to students, like housing, and increasing the affordability of parking options on campus, watch the exclusive interview on CTV’s YouTube page.
Serena Bettis can be reached at news@collegian.com or on Twitter @serenaroseb.
