Mechelle Hankerson
News Editor
Chaneé Patterson
Capital News Service
Five years after Virginia Tech made campus safety the focus of lawmakers across the nation, the school seems to be shying away from the issue during this year’s General Assembly session.
While VCU students made campus safety an explicit priority at their “Rams Day on the Hill,” Virginia Tech students participating in “Hokie Day 2012” were hesitant to say the school was focusing on anything except higher education funding.
Students from both schools visited Capital Square last week to present their legislative priorities to state lawmakers.
VCU’s Student Government Association provided participating students a list of talking points and bills on topics ranging from funding to concealed weapons on campus. Tech provided participating students with a folder including an itinerary, two pages of financial figures and a list of legislators and their phone numbers.
VCU’s SGA president, Asif Bhavnagri, said recent events at campuses across the country and specifically at Tech have made student safety an important issue for the urban university in Richmond.
“The dynamic way our university is laid out, it is important that (campus safety) is not forgotten,” Bhavnagri said.
A.J. Palmer, a student senator with the Virginia Tech Student Government Association, said Tech has always made funding the main focus for Hokie Day.
“It has always been about the funding,” said Palmer, who has attended the event the past three years. “I guess there’s this perception that it’s OK to cut higher education funding because we can just raise tuition.”
Tech’s state legislative liaison, Elizabeth Hooper, said students are the driving force behind what issues the university chooses to pursue during any legislative session.
“We like them to set their own agenda and talk about the things that are important to them,” Hooper said. “This is really their day.”
Tech SGA leaders said students help the association choose what issues to pursue. Campus security was not an issue brought to the SGA by students, they said.
“There’s a lot being done, and students feel like the campus community is really safe because we all depend on each other,” said the Tech SGA Speaker of the House Naomi Dam. “We have this environment where we all feel like members of the family, willing to reach out and extend our help to each other.”
Tech SGA members declined to comment on the omission of campus safety issues from Hokie Day.
According to Hooper, the Tech administration gives students information about the General Assembly session but does not push the students to pursue any issue.
Although it wasn’t addressed at Hokie Day, Hooper said the school opposes bills that would allow concealed weapons on campus, but officials are “letting the process work itself out.”
“We don’t want to make this about (Tech); this is about all of higher education being safe,” said Hooper, who was at Virginia Tech in 2007 when a student shot and killed 32 people and wounded 25 others before committing suicide.
In addition to campus safety, VCU students focused on telling legislators not to raise tuitions, asking for no discrimination based on gender or sexual orientation and increasing bike lanes and roads in Richmond.
According to SGA legislative issues and civic action chair Virag Patel, VCU also wanted to focus on legislation that would grant money to VCU to help fund Cabell Library renovations.
“Our current library, it was made to only hold 15,000 students, (and) now we have over 30,000 students on campus,” Patel said before the event. “(The) library hasn’t kept up the progress that VCU itself has made.”
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