Quarterly Student Association Meeting with Dean Williams10/4/2016

In attendance:

Abhinav, Jacob, Christine, Seciah, Paul, Adil, Associate Dean Stacy Herman, and Dean Williams

  1. Introductions
  2. Sounding Board
  3. Top 2 proposals
  4. Refrigerator for students
  5. Who is going to monitor it? Where does it go? Public Health/biohazards issues.
  6. 1000 students: how would this function?
  7. This is hard to function in the departments in cleaning and preventing it from being a public health hazard.
  8. Cost of supplying insulated lunch bags that could be given to students as an alternative?
  9. Will look into with HCSA’s supplier of large scale items.
  10. Gender Inclusive bathrooms
  11. Ken Wenger’s team: facilities issues, but is currently occurring. Departments for the most part have these on their floor.
  12. University’s time-line: not known at this point
  13. Erika Eitland will also be working on the Presidential Task Force
  14. Questions from Wiliams?: What are our counterparts doing? What is Ken’s status?
  15. SM2 Tuition Proposal:
  16. Issue: Students who are in their second year have to pay per credit, while new students have a flat fee.
  17. Solution: Reason for flat billing there were over 75 ways to bills students, and with the new system, we were able to step back to be able to reestablish what is back
  18. Grandfathered individuals in because of past
  19. ~105 SM2 second year students: with very different billing systems.
  20. As of Fall 2, at the end of the Fall 2 Add/Drop period, they will be individually billed for up to 80 credit hours, but will always pay the same as all students.
  21. Email will be released this afternoon or tomorrow.
  1. Mental Health Counselor in ODI
  2. Putting on the radar: how do we address the issues of police violence against the black community and other larger events (especially with their frequency)
  3. Not having vigils as a reflex: how do we do something more meaningful?
  4. Is it always long waiting period? Could they open a clinic here? What are the different ways that we can supply this beyond a Mental Health Counselor?
  5. What is the extent and the scope? ODI serves the entire population.
  6. Would not want to replace the professional/clinical support of UHS.
  7. Have Dean Rosenthal’s office give suggestions.
  8. Financial Transparency
  9. Students are having difficulties how decisions are made regarding school finances, tuition costs and funding opportunities how do we create to the culture of transparency
  10. Proposal:
  11. Work with relevant stake holders in HSPH Admin to create informational materials accessible to students including
  12. Flow charts and timelines illustrating how/when decisions made on annual budget, tuition costing
  13. FAQs offering clarification on major gifts
  14. Centralized repository of funding opportunities
  15. Request:
  16. Commitment to culture of transparency: Yes (Absolute is impossible)
  17. 75% is sponsored research, 15% endowment, and the rest is tuition
  18. Already have a report ongoing from March that is not complete
  19. Will give rationalization for funds
  20. Will be about 1 million short for FY18 because of lack of performance of endowmentwe are not as negatively impacted by the endowment because of the primary source of our funding of research
  21. Biggest buckets: salary support and financial aid
  22. Commitment to collaborate with and support HCSA in efforts to increase access to financial information
  23. Is it possible to set up a flowchart of the annual budgeting? Is possible with CFO, lasts all year. Work in progress.
  24. Dean Williams will send a memo explaining the information
  25. CFO invited to next meeting
  26. Central “Craigslist” type of funding opportunities
  27. Must come departments because of training grant slots and endowments
  1. Action Items:
  2. Sounding board: costs for ice boxes, cooler bags
  3. Gender inclusive: find out what the other schools are doing and talk to Ken
  4. SM2 Proposal: see email released later
  5. Mental Health Counselor:check in with Meredith and establish how different than the University Counseling Service that is available.
  6. Financial Transparency: Memo on sources of funding and where it goes, CFO will come to next meeting
  7. Also look into creating a repository for posted positions