SA committee presents constitution revisions

By Andrew Ta     12/3/13 6:00pm

The Student Association Committee on Constitutional Revisions presented its draft of a proposed SA constitution at the Dec. 2 Student Senate meeting. The proposal may replace the current constitution if the Senate votes to ratify it on Feb. 3, until which point it is still being amended, SA Parliamentarian Brian Baran said.

"[With] the previous document, we think a lot of the confusion was that procedures were outdated and not really what we were doing," Baran, who is a Thresher copy editor, said. "Each topic was covered in the constitution and bylaws in separate pages. You'd [have to] flip back and forth, and it got very confusing in terms of identifying all the procedures for what you needed to do and then applying them."

The proposed draft would restructure what currently exists as two separate entities - the constitution and the bylaws - into a single document that would group information by topic and make references to other sections if necessary for clarification, Baran said.

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"We're restructuring it to make it easier to find procedures for what you're going to do," Baran, a Duncan College junior, said. "[We're] preserving what the SA is [and] how the SA works."

The most recent version of the draft is available at sa.rice.edu/constitution. Questions, concerns, comments and suggestions should be sent to bbaran@rice.edu.

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