The St. Edward’s University Student Government Association is beginning a structural overhaul that will eventually reduce the number of senators and remove their classifications.

At the same March 10 senate meeting that inducted three new senators, Vice President Noah Corn announced that SGA is attempting to downsize the legislative branch and restructure the executive branch. The changes, if approved by the student body, will go into effect for the fall semester. The judicial branch – the Student Court of Appeals – is remaining as it is.

“It’s not for us that we restructure ourselves,” Corn said at the meeting. “It’s for the student body.”

Corn said the intention behind the changes is to make SGA, which has received criticism in the past for its lack of student outreach, more efficient and more able to respond to students.

The structural overhaul will take place in a step-by-step process, with four bills gradually making the changes over the course of three weeks and spring elections introducing these changes to the student body on April 4.

Zachary Peal, chair of the Intergovernmental Affairs committee, said at the March 6 IGA meeting that making the changes instantly is impossible because of the SGA constitution. Structural changes require constitutional changes, which students can vote for in the spring elections through referendum.

Peal has been in charge of writing the four bills and explaining them to the IGA committee and then to the senate.

Three of the four bills altering SGA’s structure affect the legislative branch, which is comprised of senators headed by the vice president. Two of the bills were approved for final passage at the March 10 senate meeting, which means one of them is up for referendum.

The first bill, S.B. 14, is procedural. It makes the other three bills possible by creating a constitutional referendum on the spring elections ballot. Students will be able to vote on whether they want the constitution to change.

S.B. 15 removes most of the qualifications to run for senator. The other bill that affects the legislative branch, S.B. 17, removes senator titles – class, residence hall, and school – so that senators universally represent students at large. It will be up for final passage at the March 31 senate meeting.

Currently, 23 senators comprise the legislative branch. There are eight senators for the classes, 11 senators for the residence halls and apartments, and five senators for the academic schools.

With S.B. 15, anyone can run for the East Hall senator position or for any of the other positions, as Peal explained at the IGA meeting.

“You don’t have to live in East Hall to run for the East Hall senate seat,” Peal said. “If you know more people in East Hall than your competition and win, you can be that senator. It matters more about who you connect with than what your qualifications are.”

He said his thinking behind S.B. 15 was to make the elections more competitive, as the bill streamlines the process of running for senator by having only general requirements to follow.

But S.B. 17 will, if passed, override these changes when it goes into effect because it aims to remove senator classification, reduce the number of senators to 12, and get rid of the three committees, adding liaison positions instead. The liaisons may be part of the executive branch rather than the legislative.

If S.B. 17 is passed, it will go into effect in the fall. At that point, the senators elected in the spring will no longer have specific constituents to represent, which Peal said gives all groups of students at St. Edward’s a voice.

“Current qualifications make it impossible to represent other groups like transfer or grad students, so both S.B. 15 and 17 widen SGA’s ability to reach students,” Peal said in a later interview.

SGA is also restructuring the executive branch because there are too many positions and not enough students to fill those positions, Corn said.

S.B. 16 will reduce the number of directors in the cabinet from seven to three and will also add a chief financial officer. Corn said that any of these aspects of the new structure are tentative, as future senate and IGA meetings may change it.

The decision to downsize SGA came out of a committee that Corn and SGA President Krista Heiden attended along with Residence Life Director Dave Rozeboom, SGA Advisor Marisa Lacey, Student Life Director Tom Sullivan, and Advising Specialist for the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences Lindsey Taucher, who was a member of SGA when she was an undergraduate at St. Edward’s.

The committee was formed at Sullivan’s suggestion as a way of discerning why so many students were dropping out of SGA and why others felt disconnected from it.

“We asked basic questions at first, such as what the purpose of SGA is, and then we grew more specific and formed our solution,” Corn said. “We basically started with a skeleton and then worked our way toward organs and flesh.”

One student agreed with the perception that SGA has lost touch with students but thinks that the planned restructuring might help its relationship with them.

Junior Amarette Edmonson heard about the senators’ plans and attended the March 10 senate meeting to learn the details. She said at first that SGA’s plans seemed like a bad idea.

Upon attending the meeting and hearing what the senators had to say, she changed her mind.

“The structural changes are the best thing to happen for SGA. As it is now, SGA doesn’t do anything for the students, but the new structure will benefit them,” Edmonson said.