By Lexey Burns, Editor in Chief
Laurentian’s Students’ General Association has invited students to attend their December general meeting. This is the first time they have advertised a meeting in the 2020/2021 school year.
But the SGA has not published board meeting minutes since their January meeting in 2019.
This means that they have not shared the content of their meetings in a year and a half.
They did, however, live-stream an SGA meeting on their Facebook page in April of 2019.
Eric Chappell, President of the SGA, is in his second year as president, after a controversial election this past spring. He runs the SGA office with other executive members, Benjamin Mackenzie, Vice President of Student Life, and Malek Abou-Rabia, Vice President of Education.
The minutes can be found on the SGA’s website under “Governance” and “Meeting Minutes”. There, minutes from meetings since 2015 have been published in both French and English.
There have been no minutes published in 2020.
In the SGA’s Constitution Bylaws (which are available for the public to read under the “Governance” page on the SGA’s website), “Executive meetings are considered closed-door meetings but will have published minutes,” (page 16).
Their Governance page, specifically their list of the Board of Directors, which contains the names, programs, year of study, and contact information for each staff member of the SGA has not yet been updated this year as well. It currently lists Tomas Antolin Grant as Vice President of Student Life and Katlyn Kotila as Vice President of Education. Both were part of last year’s staff.
Abou-Rabia commented about the minutes of the September meeting.
“It gets approved at the next board meeting,” Abou-Rabia said.
He added that once the board approves the minutes, they will post them.
Abou-Rabia said that he is “working on getting as much of last years [sic] minutes to post on the website” and that he was working with the chair to do so.
As of November 22nd, an email was sent out to all members of the SGA, inviting them to join the December meeting that will be held on Sunday, December 13th at 4 pm via Zoom. In the email, it says that all students planning on attending the meeting have to register 3 days in advance, having proper verification (your student number and Laurentian email.)
They ask all students attending to arrive at the Zoom meeting 15-20 minutes before the start of the meeting to confirm registration.