After a brief discussion at this week”s Faculty Senate meeting, changes were approved to the Staff Council bylaws – including changing the name of the group from Staff Affairs Committee to Staff Council.
Fizzell
“If you look at the definition of those two words, “council” and “affairs,” council is a much better fit,” said Staff Council Chair Greg Fizzell.
Fizzell said the change of name was inspired by informal conversations with people on campus.
The other approved change has to do with how many staff members are elected onto the council. Before, there were a certain number of staff in different areas of the university, such as exempt staff and off-campus staff, allowed to serve on council, Fizzell said.
To better fit the current classification system, Fizzell proposed that the council allow one representative for every 50 staff members in a pay grade.
“If a particular pay grade doesn”t have 50 members, then we will combine all of those into one and do the one out of 50 ratio out of those combined pay grades,” he said.
Fizzell said Staff Council was working on a bigger project with the bylaws and that Faculty Senate will likely hear from the group again within the next year.
Most of the questions from Faculty Senate involved small wording changes that could be made to the bylaws. Faculty Sen. James Foster of the College of Science asked how many representatives would now serve on Staff Council with the second change.
Fizzell said the final number would likely fluctuate, but the one for every 50 ratio was created with the hope to have 30-35 representatives on Staff Council.
Erin Bamer can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @ErinBamer