Student senate wraps up year

The Associated Students of the University of Wyoming conducted its last meeting this week, wherein the newly elected senators tied up loose ends for the year.

Senators approved job descriptions for the ASUW executive positions, including chief of staff, director of government affairs, director of finance, director of promotions and marketing, director of diversity and leadership, and director of student programming and sustainability.

The final item of business at the meeting was to ask senators to submit ideas for end-of-year spending, which is the money left over from what was allocated last year.

ASUW Senior Accounting Associate Kristy Isaak said the money is used to buy things that can’t be covered in the budget, such as office items.

The final spending requests may be submitted by ASUW funded programs like the student attorney program and freshman senate. The money can be used toward promotional items meant to increase the visibility of ASUW, such as T-shirts and mugs.

The end-of-year spending requests are due in June 2012.

Looking back over the events of the year, newly elected ASUW President Joel Defebaugh said he was most proud of the revisions to the finance policy and the Recognized Student Organizations Funding Board revisions.

“With Saferide transitioning, the RSO funding board is one of the biggest programs that we oversee,” Defebaugh said.

“We saw a good deal of legislation that affected students and several controversial issues really made the students know what was going on with ASUW, whether the smoking ban or wildcatter. It correlates directly to high student outcome for ASUW elections,” Defebaugh said.

Defebaugh said he plans to work over the summer on hiring the executive staff and planning for the 100th year anniversary celebration for ASUW.

He also said UW will host a number of students from Shanghai University and he plans to make them feel welcome.