Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Recent proposed cuts to important student resources have resulted in ripples of frustration among members of the KU community.
Last Tuesday the student senate finance committee voted to remove all funding for the Willow Domestic Violence Center starting next year, and all funding for the Douglas County AIDS Project, Headquarters and DaGuGi SafeCenter, starting fiscal year 2013.
These cuts will go before the full Senate for approval at tonight’s meeting.
The proposed bill would remove these programs from block funding status, which is allocated from the Student Senate Activity Fund. The argument is that these programs are not technically student activities, but student services and should be funded elsewhere in the budget, outside of the activity fund. The student body president is working to put together a task force to determine how these services could best be funded in the future.
By not fully funding these services, students will undoubtedly suffer. The Willow Domestic Violence Center provides shelter, peer counseling, advocacy and other services to survivors of domestic violence; Headquarters provides a mental health services hotline; the Douglas County AIDS Project provides free HIV testing among other services and DaGuGi SafeCenter provides sexual assault counseling.
If student senators agree that these programs are essential to the community and should be funded, then senators should establish a new funding plan before eliminating the current funds altogether.
In an interview with The Kansan, Chief of Staff Aaron Dollinger said he is confident the task force will find alternative means of funding by the fiscal year 2013, when block allocation funding for these programs would stop. Therefore, the success of this task force is absolutely crucial. However, the task force is yet to be formed and sometimes even the most well intentioned task forces fail. Possible failure to fund these programs is a risk student senators cannot take.
Each student pays $2.11 per semester for these services. According to David Cohen, Student Senate treasurer, the money saved from these proposed cuts would not be reallocated to other activities. Therefore, this is not an issue of saving money but an issue of semantics.
The proposed cuts would affect the Douglas County AIDS Project, Headquarters, DaGuGI SafeCenter and Willow Domestic Violence center. Even if contributions per student are relatively small, with funding cuts coming from federal and state levels, these services need every bit of funding they can get. Gov. Brownback’s proposed budget completely cuts state funding to community mental health centers, making student funds to such programs even more crucial.
If student senators agree that these programs provide vital resources for students and should be funded, then a plan for funding should be put in place before voting to approve a sweeping change in the current funding system. While an effort to put together a successful task force might be well intentioned, there is still a chance the task force might fail. If the task force fails to establish a different funding plan for these programs, then the student senators have failed the students they have been elected to represent.
— Erin Brown for the Kansan Editorial Board.
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Editorial: Proposed cuts risk future funding for vital student resources
Why were these kinds of things even funded in the first place? The fact that they were paid from the student "activity" fund is ridiculous. It sounds like it was used more as a slush fund for any kind of bleeding-heart liberal cause that seemed good at the time. That funding shoud be cut so the money can be used for real student activities once again. These services aren't affiliated with the university and they aren't even located on campus.
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