SBA Board 2014-2015
This blog post is meant to summarize many of the efforts from students this year who helped SBA perform its work. I want to thank the SBA Board for they have given me their Friday nights and Sunday afternoons to work on SBA matters, the SBA Committees who implemented many of our events, and the dozens of students who have volunteered their own time to support our efforts this year (I write a lot of thank yous just so you know).
When I decided to run for SBA President a little over 14 months ago, I nicknamed my campaign “Project Better McGeorge” and asked my close friends for their assistance to help make our student government more actively involved with the student body. I wanted to be an SBA President who was involved in the student community and help connect our Board of Alumni to our students. I wanted the SBA to act rather than react.
Ultimately I think we accomplished many of the goals established in the campaign this year, but only because I had the help of many of you. To sum up the mission, my goals were to use the position to focus on professional opportunities, help build a community on campus where the incoming class was more integrated with the upper division students, and improve SBA processes when it came to student money.
Prioritizing Professional Opportunities
Most of this work came primarily through trying to connect our alumni more to our campus whether it was the collaborative work that brought our first Salary Negotiation Panel to campus, working with Student Affairs to host our alumni to talk to us about how they passed the bar (since you need a license to even start legal work), or making general announcements to students about our Board of Alumni events and attending their Saturday meetings.
I also used the position of SBA President to help move along AB 100 (a bill to create a post-graduate law school fellowship program lead by McGeorge) in our Legislative and Public Policy Clinic by working with other SBA Presidents in California who I met at the American Bar Association Conference. It is my hope that the bill will move forward through the process this summer and will give a couple McGeorge graduates a chance to participate in public service with some financial support and find work in the coming years. The effort so far would not have been possible though without the help of my teammates Raihane Dalvi and Amanda Kelly.
I also promised to partner with the McGeorge Women’s Caucus (MWC) in particular as SBA President. I believe that the women here at McGeorge are a force to be reckon with and will be stellar professionals. At the same time I am not oblivious to the unique challenges women will face in the workforce and wanted to invest my own personal energies in helping change that dynamic. I enjoyed assisting MWC Chair Jackie Hang’s efforts to bring one of Sacramento’s most influential leaders, Congresswoman Doris Matsui, to keynote the MWC Auction. I felt it was important to bring a powerful leader, particularly a woman, to share her experiences so that our female graduates are better equipped to access positions of power and leadership.
Lastly, I want to thank the SBA Professional Development Committee Chairs Alexander Khan and Amanda Kelly for working with our faculty by providing feedback on the newly launched Legal Profession course and helping the Career Development Office. Much of their work began almost two years ago before the launch of the course and I appreciate their willingness to serve a second term with SBA to continue their work.
Building a McGeorge Community
A community and a culture does not just happen automatically. It takes an effort to help people meet and to establish a positive environment. The SBA this year took on that challenge by directly working on Orientation Week rather than delegating it to other students. I enjoyed sitting on the Orientation Committee with Second Year Evening Representative Megan Donaghey (who ran the scavenger hunt). But again, Orientation Week was only doable because of the involvement of the dozens of upper division students who came back to campus a few days early to help. To give you an example of the McGeorge community that came out to welcome our new incoming class, take a look at this list. A special thanks to Jaclyn Shanahan for making me aware that we needed to have students there on the first night to welcome the incoming class after the swearing in ceremony.
Launching the Student Leaders program to help connect upper division students to the incoming class could not have happened without the willingness of the 44 upper division students who stepped up to meet the needs of the 70 students in the incoming class that signed up for a mentor. I also want to thank in particular Monika Troike for working with me over the summer to brainstorm a relaunch as well as helping me run it with Jessica Melgar and Drew Weir. I am grateful that incoming SBA President Anthony Crisostomo intends to continue the mentorship program and build on the lessons learned from my time. One of the most enjoyable parts of my presidency was getting to meet the incoming class and introducing them to their mentors.
We were also able to host a 1L midterm panel during the Fall semester with the assistance of our best students Karly McCrory (who helped jump start the whole thing), Andrew Crouse, Ryan Mallory-Jones, Chelsea Easton, Jackie Castro, Virginia Martucci, Ian McGlone, Ashley Pane, and John Kennedy. They volunteered their time to speak with 1Ls about outlining, how to prepare for a test, and how to balance your life during the hardest year of law school.
I thank the Activities and Sports Committee for organizing our games such as soccer and basketball and Wellness Committee in their efforts to help take the edge off law school by bringing us a phenomenal Wellness Week and taking over the outline bank on TWEN when the club Students for a Better McGeorge discontinued. Also thank you to our Barristers Committee (Jackie Zdanowski, Aparna Agnihotri, Meghan Green, Rachel Bonifacious, Chelsea Easton, and Chelsey Smith) for spending their December break putting the finishing touches on the largest student event on campus and investing hours of their time during the Fall semester. They were also able to throw us a great party with less money than before while also reducing our ticket prices by $10 a person.
It Is Your Money
These are the words I stated to students during the campaign when I rejected compensation to break from the tradition of compensating SBA Presidents. I wanted that action to serve as an example of changing how student funds were to be treated and to raise expectations of how we govern their money. The SBA also did not have a retreat to Lake Tahoe over the summer as previous SBAs, we instead came to campus to do our work. Those of us not on the Barristers Committee also did not go to Barrister’s Ball for free and instead paid our own way just like any other student. Fiscally these actions added up to a small amount of our total budget, but it demonstrated how serious the SBA Board took the charge by students to serve.
The SBA Blog also received an upgrade this year and contained a detailed accounting of virtually all SBA spending through the tireless efforts of the SBA Treasurer Neil Cacali and SBA Secretary Kate Casey’s efforts to be timely with the Minutes. I believe it should be on SBA to provide information of our actions and activities pro-actively rather than wait to be asked to show our work. We also made some changes to our policies in order to increase our support of student clubs to help them meet their goals.
These changes and a more proactive approach with student clubs increased our spending from last year by more than $15,000 while we cut costs by nearly $6,000 in other areas. Mainly by limiting our school wide BBQs to evening only, not taking a staff retreat to Lake Tahoe, eliminating the President’s and ABA Rep’s stipends, not subsidizing Barrister Ball tickets to SBA Board members, and reducing the Barrister Ball overall budget. The Dean and CDO also contributed $1300 to SBA to assist myself and our ABA Rep Mirwais Haider during the summer to afford to travel to the annual American Bar Association Conference.
The full details of this year’s income and expenditures have been summarized by our the SBA Treasurer and can be found here.
Other Notable Accomplishments and Last Thanks Yous
Thank you Elections Committee, in particular Jennifer Trotter and Sean Baird, for picking up the challenge I gave to them to bring our elections online so we could ensure that every student could vote with ease. It took an enormous amount of work to accomplish the transition and I hope that future SBAs continue with online voting.
Thank you Amelia Hicks and Bruce Pence for taking on the tough work with a small budget and maintaining the McGeorge Community Garden. It takes a dedicated group of students to keep it going and I appreciate your efforts to help expand its reach for students.
Thank you Diversity Committee, particularly Riha Pathak and Courtney Dowell, for taking on the labor intensive task of organizing Diversity Week. This year was particularly important because McGeorge now has one of the most diverse student bodies in California. Another major related event that is worth noting for this year’s Diversity Week was the faculty commitment to launching our first ever Diversity Scholarship fund. The final numbers are still coming in, but our faculty this year have donated more than $50,000 to help provide scholarship money for future McGeorge students from diverse backgrounds.
I could write forever on thanking people and highlighting great things done by them, but I have these things called finals so I will need to write some conclusion material. Well, maybe one last set of thank yous to our Vice Presidents Shoeb Mohammed and Lexi Howard for building the SBA Committees in the first place and doing their part representing the day and evening school and our Student Representatives for taking on the major social events such as our Grad Party (woot!), 1L Party, Half Way There Party, and our school wide BBQs.
Work left incomplete – Daycare at McGeorge
One of projects I took on and could not see to the finish line was getting a student coop daycare on campus. After it was raised with me in the Fall semester, I worked with Dean McGuire to explore our options and met with law students who run the Davis Coop to see what can be done and how they handled their insurance. Basically the hurdles we face come from the following sources:
- Being a 90+ year old campus means we have asbestos issues in some of our older buildings, which gives UoP legal counsel some major headaches.
- UoP, not McGeorge School of Law, is hesitant to move forward on a daycare in our chapter school without also accommodating the business school and dental school. Like it or not, we’re part of a larger system and while benefit from their financial support we also live under UoP’s rules.
- Since this is student run, it would require students to raise more than $1,000 a year to pay for insurance.
The McGeorge students who informed me that they wanted to be kept in the loop have all the information I have been able to collect to carry on the fight. Ultimately this is something our school would have to convince UoP to allow on our campus and the right opportunity during renovations would have to be presented. When I came to that point, I realized I would not be able to see this to the finish line as a student.
Fiscal Challenges Ahead for SBA
It would be remiss of me if I did not flag for students that the SBA will face some significant fiscal challenges in the coming years. I do not envy the tough choices the new SBA Board will have to make but it is not a secret that our school is shrinking in light of the changes in the legal market. When our school has fewer students, SBA’s main source of revenue (that $100 SBA fee on your tuition) shrinks as well. The only other sources of revenue for SBA are Barrister ticket sales (which goes towards paying for the Ball), return of funds from student clubs that dissolve (around $1200 this year), and money contributed to SBA by Admin (this year I raised $1300 from them for example).
Our projected student body count next year is 520 students, which translates into $52,000 in revenue. To give you some context of how quickly our school population has shrunk the SacBee reported that our class of 2013 had 320 graduates. Based on the records from the Business Office, SBA revenue from student fees essentially looks like the following below:
2013-2014 Student Fee Revenues $64,000
2014-2015 Student Fee Revenues $57,000
2015-2016 Student Fee Revenues $52,000 ← Predicted
It should be obvious that less revenue will impact the SBA’s ability to meet the needs of students. We are fortunate though to have a reserve fund of around $23,000 to handle this drop in revenue for a few years if expenditures remain consistent around $60,000 and revenues do not increase. It is also the school’s goal to return us to a population of 600 students in the coming years, which makes a budget of around $60,000 a stable and predictable point for future SBAs. However, it is also possible that these challenges persist and I want folks to be aware and plan accordingly in the years to come. Planning for the challenge in the short term ensures stability in the long term.
Next Steps
As outgoing SBA President, I plan to submit an application to sit on the McGeorge Board of Alumni after I pass the bar and find work. I believe more can be done to try to connect our alumni to students and having worked in DC for eight years, I am more than happy to provide guidance to a McGeorge student interested in working there and share my network. So basically, while our casual encounters in the Quad will be coming to an end and you will no longer find me in a classroom, never hesitate to reach out to me if I can be helpful to you.
Thank you for the privilege of serving you as SBA President.
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