On Jan. 23, BC Governance (BCG) met to discuss key issues for the college. The BCG includes the College Assembly and eight councils. The College Assembly meets monthly and comes up with recommendations to give to the president. The College Assembly consists of the constituency councils (student, exempt, classified and faculty) and functional councils (student success, resources and planning, diversity and inclusion, and infrastructure). All BC members are permitted to submit comments online, attend council meetings and become a council member when elections take place in spring. The BCG is responsible for promoting initiatives such as the three rainbow crosswalks, the budget review advisory, funding for college-wide professional development and many other projects.
At Monday’s meeting, a number of issues were discussed. These include a range of employee policies, student enrollment being down, poor student in-person attendance, health management for the campus’ 2000 trees and how to fill the North Campus seat on the Exempt Council. Both the tree health management proposal and the North Campus seat proposal are being voted on in the February meeting. Regarding the trees, they plan to do a survey to determine if the trees have a disease and how quickly it has progressed. Concerning the seat, Bellevue Children’s Academy leased out the North Campus as of fall 2022, which means that the seat may consolidate with another area of campus. During the open forum, which is the time anyone can bring up ideas, installing a Little Free Library was proposed. While brought up, it is up to one of the councils to pick up the idea.
The representative from the President’s Cabinet, Rodger Harrison, who is also the VP of Information Technology Services, talked about better cyber security. A problem BC has been facing is a lot of spam mail. For example, outsiders pretending to be students will enroll in a course to get a BC email, which they then use to access BC members, sending them spam emails. Harrison is making the governance aware of the problem, and now it is up to one of the councils to create a proposal solution.
As for upcoming events, Light up the Night will occur on Feb. 13 at 5:30 p.m., meeting at the student housing lobby. The group will walk around the exterior campus to determine places that need better lighting. The campus is currently on a timer system, but this may change. There will be a Valentine’s Day party on Feb. 14. Additionally, there will tentatively be the official grand opening of the library entrance with gender-inclusive bathrooms, water bottle filling stations and elevator access, which has been a nine-year-long project. Lastly, if you’re interested in attending the next meeting, it will be on Feb. 13 from 1:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on Microsoft Teams.
