The Allegheny Student Government met in joint session with the cabinet of college President Ron Cole, ’87, for the final General Assembly of the year Tuesday night. The two groups sat for over an hour in the lobby of the Henderson Campus Center and discussed a wide variety of topics, including the accessibility of SNAP benefits, the college’s absence policy and mental health resources.
All these concerns came to a head with the final topic: student retention, which Senator London Dejarnette, ’24, told administrators was tied to other campus concerns.
“Students do not have what they need to successfully exist here,” they said. “I think that once those things are addressed, we can address this at a much higher scale.”
College officials responded to many of these concerns with promises of a further conversations and follow-up.
“I won’t sit here and make promises that I know I can’t keep, but what I want to share are some things that I want to follow up on,” Cole said earlier in the meeting.
Notably missing from the meeting were comments students from outside of ASG. Previous iterations of this meeting — including a fiery GA in November of last year — saw the conversation driven primarily by audience questions. This meeting, however, was primarily a public conversation between ASG and Cole’s cabinet, with a handful of students drifting in and out of the lobby. When the floor was opened for constituent comments at the end of the session, no student spoke.
A full recording of the meeting is accessible on ASG’s Facebook page.