Spring term’s ASUO offices move from the old wing of the EMU to a new location in MacArthur Court has spurred a significant drop in senator attendance of scheduled office hours.
The office hour issue was brought to Senate Ombudsperson Miles Sisk’s attention the second Friday of spring term when he received a call at 3:30 p.m. to come back to the ASUO office to sign five special request forms.
The forms require a senator’s signature and are usually signed during office hours. No one had been in that day. According to the ASUO website, five senators have Friday office hours at different locations around campus.
Sisk isn’t the only one who has noticed an apathy towards office hours.
“I personally have noticed a few senators regularly not showing up on a consistent basis,” Senator Helena Schlegel said. “But the office assistants are sending out more frequent emails needing special requests signed, and other students are starting to comment on the lack of senators in the office, which is troublesome.”
As the Senate Ombudsperson, Sisk polices and enforces senate duties. He tracks meeting attendance, office hours and makes sure that things like cultural competence trainings and finance retreats are attended.
Currently there is no sign-in system for office hours. Instead, Sisk makes random drop-ins to see if senators are serving their required hours.
“Really, the way that I view the whole office hour requirement rules within the GTN (ASUO Constitution) isn’t just to have senators sitting in an office but the idea is that they could be accessible to the student body,” Sisk said. “Frankly in the EMU South they’re not very accessible. At this point, it’s not very widely used.”
The ASUO constitution requires senators to hold three office hours a week. The constitution also states that failure to hold two-thirds of those office hours for three weeks results in the Senate Ombudsperson filing a grievance with the Constitution Court against the senator in question. This isn’t Sisk’s goal.
Sisk explained that with only a month left of the current senate, any grievance filed would only serve to embarrass senators.
“Frankly most of the people who are leaving don’t care anymore,” Sisk said. “So for me, greivancing someone would be more of a pain in the head for myself than for anyone else.”
Sisk has tried to combat these issues by offering alternatives to traditional office hours.
“I’ve tried making it so that they can go out and branch out, meet with groups, go do other activities outside,” Sisk said. “Because that’s honestly why we have office hours in the first place so that they can make those connections and be accessible. If sitting in an office isn’t accessible for most students then something needs to change.”
ASUO President Elect Beatriz Gutierrez would encourage members of the ASUO to hold office hours in different places like group and program meetings.
“I think that’s a good idea,” Gutierrez said. “I would like myself and people in my executive to go out and talk to people and their programs and unions until they feel safe enough to come to us.”
Sisk said that since addressing the lack of attendance at senate he has seen an upward trend in office hour attendance.