TLR: Is Southeastern all that you had expected?
Simmons: Honestly, I didn’t really know what to expect. I’d always thought I’d be going to LSU or Ole Miss because going to school in Mississippi, I went to all the bigger schools to the games and whatnot. I think the most convenient thing is the fact that you can walk to campus in fifteen minutes. For instance, at LSU a class might be a fifteen minute drive to campus instead of just walking fifteen minutes to campus, which is so much more convenient. Also, the personal connection you get with a teacher [at Southeastern]. For instance, at LSU, you have 800 students in a class, so you’re just another number. Here at Southeastern, all my teachers know me by my name. The biggest class I’ve been in was I think 110, that’s when you have a bunch of students because it’s a history course.
When and why did you decide to get involved in SGA?
I joined Kappa Alpha Fraternity my first semester and I want to say my junior year a couple of guys had been in SGA and it convinced me to do it, but I was involved in several other organizations. At the time, MJ Ahmad and Luke Holloway pretty much convinced me. There were some positions open and a certain college needed a senator, so I decided to give it a shot and I’ve loved it ever since.
What is your platform as Vice President?
What I want to run on is better communication between students and SGA. From the election I learned a lot. Just trying to get people to vote, I mean there were only around 1,500 votes with 15,000 students here. Granted it’s a commuter school, so people are just coming to class and going home. That was pretty much the biggest issue with students. For instance, with Garrett Hall, the business building I’m in, students are like ‘What is SGA?’ and ‘What am I voting for?’ I had to talk to each person and give them the gist of what it is and what we do. A lot of the stuff they had no clue what we do. Just for instance, the senate and legislative branch; I’ve told them the Bloomberg Lab in there, we actually funded that, the tunnel on North Campus, we funded that, just different things that we helped out to pay for and better the campus. Another big thing is students that are doing study abroad. The scholarships that the Business Department gives for study abroad, they have to come to us and ask for our funds in order to give those scholarships, and students were like, ‘Really, I didn’t know this? That’s actually really cool.’ A lot of students just don’t know, but my big thing is, throughout my term, I want to broaden SGA to the students to help them be more informed about what’s going on with SGA.
In this year’s SGA elections, student body voting was up by 38 percent from last year. Do you believe that this is something which will continue to rise?
I would imagine it would rise. My goal is to broaden and get everyone better informed about it, and if more people know about it, then more people should vote. One of the main reasons the voting numbers went up is because you could vote anywhere this year. I’m pretty sure last year there were certain polling stations you had to vote in, which we had those polling stations again this year and a lot of people thought you had to go there, but once we got the word out that you could vote anywhere, then we sent out links and more people wanted to vote. I still think a lot more people can vote. 1,500 of 15,000 students that go here, granted not all of them are full time students or some of them are dual enrolled, but still that’s a huge difference in the number.
Now even though voting percentage was up, voting was still very low with only 1,614 students voting. Why is it so difficult for SGA to get students to vote?
A lot of people, for instance in Garrett Hall, they park right above stadium, go to class, then leave. They don’t ever come in the union. The union publicizes a lot of stuff that’s where everything is and hopefully with the building of this new union, it will attract more people between class and hopefully we’ll have more SGA stuff up and different organizations to get [students] more involved to kind of move towards Hammond rather than driving from Mandeville to school and then driving back home. I’m hoping that the new union will be a really big key in getting students more involved.
What are your specific plans on remedying the low voter turnout?
We talked about it in Kappa Outlay about something big because we’re a pretty green campus and we’re trying to get this full system made where you walk into the lobbies of one of the halls and we’re going to have monitors of just different ads and stuff because we’re doing the whole ‘go green.’ We’re actually the greenest campus in the state of Louisiana. We’re going to have monitors with statistics of how much energy is being used in this building, how much we’re saving because we’ve increased our solar panels now because the Kinesiology Department has solar panels. Adding more solar panels and going more green, we’re going to have monitors that say how much energy is being used and also different slides of organizations, different media and stuff like that so people will be able to see when they are sitting in the lobby and doing nothing and they can watch the TV. It’ll show different ads and video clips of different organizations. The other thing is we have Lion Traxx and a lot of people, especially freshmen who have to park on North Campus will take Lion Traxx, and you have TV’s in there so why not advertise SGA. There are plenty of different opportunities where we can advertise SGA more. We’re even talking about getting signs to put in all of the halls that advertise SGA. It’s just advertisement. You have to be on top of promoting stuff. It’s the best way to get your name out there.
Would you support a bill to prohibit tobacco on campus?
Yes, but after we handle the problems that we have now, and then worry about that. Obviously with budget cuts and stuff like that which increases student fees. The education is more important than worrying about who’s smoking and who’s not smoking.
Over $130 million was cut from Southeastern’s state allocations. How do you plan on dealing with these cuts?
Every semester student fees increase. A lot of students don’t know why. They just hear ‘budget cuts,’ and they hear different things about the fees increasing. Hopefully we can work together and let people know why student fees increased and why budget cuts going on because people see their fee increase and think it’s just Southeastern but it’s not just Southeastern, it’s a lot more schools as well. Hopefully we can work together and just let people know what’s going on and put the word out there that people will be more understanding of it and hopefully we can resolve some matter because fees are going to increase. Fees have to cover Southeastern. Southeastern covers itself, so the only way is to increase student fees; it’s just a matter of time. It sucks that you have to pay more to go to school when getting an education is already hard enough, and now you have to pay more.
Would you be in favor of allowing students to vote on more student fees?
It would all depend of what fee they would be voting on. Some fees you don’t really have a choice; it has to be increased. If you give a certain situation of what fee we’re voting on to increase or decrease it would have to go by that, case to case.
What is your take on the Fayard Technology Center no longer being 24-hour lab?
There are pros and cons to it. First of all, 24-hours is convenient for students who are staying up late doing their homework and need to print before class. Someone who doesn’t have a laptop or doesn’t have Internet where they live so they need to go to the technology lab to do it. But at the same time, you have to have workers to work it. Let’s say they have class the next morning. They have to stay up all night to work that, granted they had to apply for it in the first place. Let’s say you need a job, you got to have a job, and you’ve got to take whatever you can get. You have to stay up all night long and go to class the next day. It’s kind of pros and cons to both, but at the same time, it’s time management as well. If students need to go print off something, get what you need to have done and know that it’s open from this hour to this hour. From the 16-17 hours that it’s open, that’s when you need to have your time management right and responsibility to go do it then. It’s just like a store being open. Not every store is a Wal-Mart where it’s open 24-hours, so if you need to go get something from a specific store, then you should have to go at the hours that it’s open.
SGA is run for and by the students. Why is it that the majority of the student body is not aware of what SGA does?
The main reason people don’t know is because they literally come to school, go to class and go home, since we’re such a big commuter school, which it’s good that we’re a commuter school because we cater to people that don’t just live here, but at the same time, it’s a downfall because there isn’t as much student involvement. It’s kind of the students in Greek Life and the other organizations are smaller because of the commuter students that we have.
Would you say that this a failure of the past administrations?
It’s something we definitely just need to build up. There are a lot of tasks that are taken on when you take office which means there’s lots of things you’ve got to get done. But at the same time, we kind of have to branch out and fit some time there to kind of get everyone more aware because if you start something and then you carry it onto the next person, they can take on what you’re doing hopefully. That’s one thing I’m trying to do, get better communication where more students are more aware of SGA. Hopefully that’s what the three of us can do when we take office. Get more students aware of what’s going on and get more students to know what SGA even is and hopefully, after a couple people have taken office, it’s 1,600 plus votes.
What do you specifically plan on doing to get in touch with the student body?
Publicizing our name, getting it out there. I’m only in one specific college and I’ve met a lot of people in there and gotten the word out in there from what’s going on from running for office.
SGA has somewhat become a Greek club because of the amount of Greeks involved. Why is there a lack of diversity within SGA?
I find that most Greeks are more involved in more organizations because usually when you join a Greek organization, Greeks put on homecoming and have their own Greek-Week events. A lot of events that put onto campus are run by Greeks. Freshmen Greeks are usually commuting when you first join, then they move to Hammond. The GPA standards that Greeks have to meet keep them to live up to certain standards. If I wouldn’t have joined KA, I probably wouldn’t be as involved as I am now because I probably would have been one of those commuter people.
Do you believe this puts non-Greek students off because SGA is so heavily Greek?
I think a lot of students don’t know that there is this many Greeks. For instance in the senate, just from this semester, there’s a lot of students that are not Greek and it’s a pretty diverse senate. We have older and younger people. They all really want to be involved and they have a lot of great ideas. It changes every year obviously, but I find now it’s much more diverse. We have a lot of different people and it’s not one class of people, it’s a lot of different people.
Does this factor into the outreach problems that SGA has encountered?
I was really caught off guard about how many people didn’t know about SGA. It’s kind of a reality check, but I find that when I talk to people now, I don’t even mention that I’m Greek. I’ll bring up other organizations that I’m in, but I’ll leave the Greek out, nothing against Greek, it’s just that I don’t want people to think ‘You’re Greek, that’s why you’re in SGA.’ I don’t want people to feel like they have to be Greek to be welcomed into SGA.
Should SGA be more open when conducting business and should Executives candidates be more open about their organization/background information when running for office?
We had a debate but it was kind of was messed up that we had to have it over at the Kiva Theatre because we usually have it over at the Student Union Theater. It was publicized. It could have been publicized way more. A lot of people didn’t know where it was and the only reason I knew where it was was because I had a class there. I feel like a lot of people didn’t know where it was so they just didn’t show up. I’m not saying that would have made a difference in getting to know who we are and whatnot. Maybe something before elections, we can do something in the union with people passing through at a certain time like 12:00 p.m. when people are passing through and they can have someone introduce all the candidates that are running. Maybe something on the TV monitors, you could do an SGA slideshow with a candidate on each slide. We have a bio on the page when you vote but like you said, a lot of people just see the face and lot of people don’t read the bio. There are a couple different things off the top of my head that we could do before students vote, just something to kind of get our name out there before the election comes up.