Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
Student Council is currently implementing its spending plan to use the $60,000 in rollover money left over from SBC-issued funds that went unused by student groups last year. After considering the results of a spring student referendum, StuCo decided to split the money between four popular projects. Approximately 73% of the funds will finance the Revolving Loan Fund for Green Initiatives, administered by the Sustainability Committee.
Student Council chose to divide the rest of the money between providing additional textbooks in the libraries, extra cameras for student to check out from ITS, and extended (semester-long) PE classes in the spring of 2010.
The $60,000 would have gone into the capital replacement fund, which provides for the replacement of SBC-funded assets (such as vans and computers) if they are broken, said Nate Erskine ’10, the current Student Council vice president. Instead, last year, StuCo asked the student body whether it wanted to spend the money elsewhere and 87% of students responded that they did.
YongJun Heo ’09, the previous president of Student Council, was inspired by a similar initiative implemented at Amherst, where leftover money was given to financial aid.
At the request of SBC, $30,000 of the $90,000 left over went to the Fun Fund, which offers money to students to host one-time events. Of the remaining money, $43,500 is going to the Revolving Loan Fund, which will be overseen by the Sustainability Committee. This committee, a joint group of administrators and students, has not yet allocated any money to specific projects, but StuCo says that it hopes members of the community will contribute proposals for the fund.
Of the remaining money, $10,000 will go to adding more textbooks to the libraries. According to Student Council’s brochure, which will appear in Sharples coinciding with their parfait takeover tonight, the libraries will probably rent textbooks for popular classes from chegg.com. In addition to offering a cheaper alternative to purchasing textbooks, the website plants a tree for every textbook rented.
Finally, the PE classes most likely to be extended are Aerobics, Power Yoga, Aikido and Bowling, since they are the most popular options; the Athletics department had planned to cut each of these classes to one-credit, quarter-long classes. According to Nate Erskine, the $4,500 in rollover money dedicated to PE classes didn’t go through soon enough to extend this semester’s classes, but the ones offered in the spring should last all semester. Additionally, SBC took over funding for Folk Dance from the Athletics department, which was planning to drop the class.
The final $2000 went to ITS, which has purchased new HD video cameras for students to use.
