SGA continues revision process for constitution
At the beginning of the summer semester, a new SGA executive council took office. The council continued working on revisions to the existing SGA constitution. Misty Woods, vice president committee coordinator, is the chair of the constitution’s ad-hoc committee.
“Updating the constitution is not going very well,” Woods said. “There are a couple of others in the team, like in the [Microsoft] Teams group, but nobody really has much time to contribute because of all the stuff going on.”
Woods explained that she currently has a detailed outline dividing the articles into sub-articles with explanations about changes that will be made to each article. Woods said she feels it would be easier to tackle it that way because if someone can only contribute to one sub-article, they can.
Patrick Cardenas, director of Student Involvement and Leadership, mentioned that because UHCL became a four-year institution and SGA expanded, the previous SGA executive council felt that the constitution needed to be updated.
Woods agreed that the constitution needs to be updated. She is interested in changing things like the GPA requirement for being in the executive council and the amount of money student organizations are able to request. However, she added that updates to the constitution will not get done this year unless she gets help from students.
The 2019-2020 SGA executive council began the revision process of the constitution in the fall 2019 semester. This revision process was met with controversy. A Discord channel was set up by Woods along with other student leaders concerned about the changes.
“The Discord channel came about because there was a group of us, it started pretty small, that were very concerned about the constitution that was being proposed and the way they were going about proposing it,” she said. “We were very suspicious about how they were going about it from just what we were hearing about it. The biggest thing I saw was that they were including a judicial branch, but that’s it. They weren’t defining what that judicial branch was, what it did, its purpose, who it was, who it answered to or anything. It was just a judicial branch and that’s it. They were saying the next cohort could fill that in. And that to me, leaves a lot of risk and it’s not a completed constitution if that’s what you’re doing. So I created a Discord channel so we could organize better.”
Woods added that members of the discord had annotated a version of the proposed constitution in a Google Doc so they could comment on what they agreed and did not agree with. They then had one person go to the former SGA president to voice their collective concerns, but felt like SGA did not change anything to reflect that. She is no longer the owner of the Discord since she is a member of the SGA executive council.
During the spring 2020 semester, a vote to change the constitution passed. Disagreements about the vote resulted in SGA issuing a statement about how the proposed constitution would not take effect, instead undergoing further revisions.
“The vote to implement an entirely new constitution did not pass due to how the current SGA constitution was interpreted,” Cardenas said. “Wording in the current constitution that speaks to a majority vote was not really defined well within the document. As a result, many students brought different interpretations to an SGA meeting when the results of the campus-wide vote were shared. Realizing the confusion, the SGA leadership team decided to withdraw the proposed new constitution and encouraged the next leadership team to consider another approach to revising the current SGA constitution, as they felt it’s still needed.”
Cardenas added that SGA will be given the necessary support from the advising team and the Office of Student Involvement and Leadership.
Students who would like to help update the constitution can attend the weekly virtual SGA meetings that take place Tuesdays at 11:30 a.m. on Zoom or contact the SGA executive council at SGA@uhcl.edu.
