The Center for Student Development & Campus Activities ( SDCA) wants to shake things up a bit, starting for next fall.

Shawn Livingston, Senior Associate Director for Student Development for SDCA was to implement a new policy for student organizations.

SDCA wants to prohibit student organizations from charging entrance fees to an event hosted by that particular organization.

“If students are already paying to come to our programs because they pay the student activity fee on their bill, if you charge them entry upon attending an event they are essentially paying twice,” Livingston said. ” We believe as professionals that that is unethical and a misappropriation or misuse of the student fee to charge students twice.”

SDCA stared to discuss this new policy over the summer. However, they could not officially do anything about it until students returned to campus. SDCA couldn’t implement this policy in the spring semester because some organizations already started to plan for events.

This policy would still allow organizations to charge money if that group were planning to do a trip, according to Livingston.

However nothing has been made official yet because  it still needs to go Student Government Association (SGA) for a ruling.

“It needs to be approved by student government because it is their money,” Livingston said. “So it is on the agenda for review and vote this week.”

If the organization is hosting an event for the purpose of raising money they can still do that, they just cannot charge students to attend an event.

“We have not taken away things like raffles and prizes,” Livingston said. “So they can still run an event with the opportunity to fundraise through a voluntarily opportunity. But for students to come to the event will not be a cost because they are already paying for it.”

Livingston admits that this may be harder for some students to raise money. But he believes that ultimately  this will help the organizations because the students will learn better techniques when it comes to raising money.

Organizations could still charge non-students from attending  an event because they don’t pay an activity fee.

For us it’s about the student attending an event and having fun,” Livingston said. “Our curriculum is not focused on raising funds. But groups want to do it but we feel like they should take advantage of students who are already paying.”