Bowdoin Student Government (BSG) spent a large segment of its weekly meeting on Wednesday in conversation with Director of Health Services Sandra Hayes, addressing student concerns with the Health Centers.
Many members of BSG said that they had heard complaints from students who had not gotten appointments as soon as they would have liked.
Hayes says that the Health Center can usually make appointments for students within 24 hours. However, some students are unwilling to take appointments that would force them to skip class.
“Many times it’s because the appointment conflicts with classes and they don’t feel sick enough to miss class,” she said. “We did have appointment times within the first 24 hours, but they had class [during that time].”
Hayes added that the health center is working on an online system for appointments.
“We have electronic medical records with the capability of a portal,” she said. “Right now, we’re unrolling the portal for incoming first years so they can put in their medical history and immunization, and we’re seeing how that works before we start it with appointments. That’s coming.”
Hayes said that the portal would also send out reminder emails to students when they had appointments, which would hopefully cut down on the number of missed appointments.
Megan Massa ’14 brought up the topic of weekend walk-in hours, asking why they were discontinued.
Hayes responded by saying that the weekend hours had not been meeting the needs of the student body. She said that the hours that the Health Center had been open were generally inconvenient for the students.
“With the opening of Midcoast urgent care, we decided to close those hours and put that funding towards other things like free Plan B and free antibiotics,” she said. “We felt that students were better served with the walk in hours at the clinic” in downtown Brunswick.
Hayes said that she hopes to maintain communication with BSG, and asked representatives to come to her with student comments.
E-Board Representative Asher Stamell ’13 came before BSG to ask for support and a signature of BSG on his letter to Dean of Student Affairs Tim Foster asking that the Thursday night concert (DJ 3LAU) of Ivies weekend be permitted to go until 1 AM; it is currently not allowed to run past midnight.
“We wanted to have an opener, 3LAU, and a closer,” said Stamell. “Now we probably won’t have a closer. All we want is an extra hour so a student can go on for that hour.”
Director of Student Life Allen Delong said that the Thursday night concert has never gone past midnight, and that it is his office—not Foster’s—that determines its duration.
Delong went on to say that, although some Thursday night programing does go past midnight, “3LAU is bigger than any other Thursday event.”
“We have a system that works well,” Delong said, adding that he wants students to have a great week, but that he is concerned because 3LAU is so much bigger than the usual Thursday night concert—Racer-X—and that he wants everything to run smoothly.
Some members expressed the belief that extending the concert may in fact make Thursday night safer for students.
“One a.m. is an extra hour at the concert at the concert where people won’t be drinking, they’ll be sobering up,” said Chris Breen ’15. “If it ends at 12, people aren’t thinking to go to bed, they’ll go somewhere else. If ends at 1, people are sobered up, and would begin to think, ‘maybe its bedtime.’”
Dani Chediak ’13 expressed reservations with the push to extend the concert.
“This is an instance where we have to be careful what we wish for,” she said.
BSG decided to work with Stamell to revise his letter to emphasize the belief that extending the concert would increase safety. BSG will vote again on the measure next week.
Members also voted unanimously to approve amendments to its constitution. These amendments aim to update outdated measures and speak more accurately to BSG’s current model. Students will be asked to vote on these changes in a referendum, in conjunction with this weekend’s executive committee elections.
A notable consitutional amendment would grant a seat in the BSG assembly to a representative from the McKeen Center. To accomodate this new seat, the Inter-House Council will lose one of its current seats in BSG.
Sam Vitello ’13 and Hannah Arrighi ’15 were absent from the meeting.