The Student Self-Assessed Fees Oversight Committee will soon hold a meeting to examine the budgets of organizations funded by student self-assessed fees. The goal is to verify that the fee assigned to each organization is utilized for the right purpose. The organizations who will be assessed are the Student Government Association, the Student Programming Association, Peer Assistance, Cheerleaders, KNSU, The Nicholls Worth and the Mosaic.

An official date for the meeting is yet to be set. Michael Naquin, assistant vice president for business affairs, will call for the meeting later in the fall.

Each organization will have its own representative. Brent Callais will represent the SGA, James Irwin will serve for the SPA, Kris Curole for Peer Assistance, Christian Joseph for Cheerleaders, Rafael Llanos for KNSU, Marie Ory for The Nicholls Worth and Brooke Champagne will stand for the Mosaic.

Dr. Eugene A. Dial, vice president of student affairs, explained the primary goal of the Oversight Committee.

“Its purpose is to see if the student assessed fees that are collected are used for the purposes that they are supposed to be used for. The board is saying if its going to collect this fee, somebody has to verify that it is being used according to what the students want it to be used for,” Dial said.

The Student Self-Assessed Fees Oversight Committee was established in 1997. The board ruled that there would be a fee oversight committee made up by the vice president of student affairs, the vice president of business affairs, and designated representatives on campus.

“Back in `98, Dr. Theriot was vice president and he decided that there would be a representative from each of the groups that have a self assessed fee and it was brought to my attention from the SGA president that the group had not met in a while. So I sent a letter to Mr. Naquin and we are soon to be calling a meeting of the committee,” Dial said.

In the meantime, the representatives are gathering their information and preparing for the meeting, like James Irwin for the SPA.

“SPA recieves an assessment of 15 dollars per student with 7 or more hours per semester. What we plan on doing is presenting our budget, and we’re going to show how our money was spent serving students, whether it be concerts, crawfish day, bus trips, other events like that. We also have spent money on professional conferences where we go to get acts at cheaper rates so we provide more artists to the students. We’re also bringing a copy of our mission statement and we’re going to show that we’re programming within the guidelines of our mission statement,” Irwin said.

Brent Callais, representing the SGA, wants to keep its fee the same.

“Our self accessed fee is now $5 and we don’t want to raise it, we want to keep it as it is, to make sure the committee recommends to let us keep our $5 fee,” Callais said.

In addition to the $5 fee for the SGA, the SPA’s fee is $15, Peer Assistance is $1, Cheerleaders have 50 cents, KNSU’s fee is $2, The Nicholls Worth receives $3, and the Mosaic gets 20 cents.

“Ideally the point of the oversight committee is to show that money is being spent for the reason the original referendum went up to vote for SPA over the past 3 years has been setting more decisive goals as to how we want to spend our money, how we can invest to reach students and how we can invest to increase our audience,” Irwin said.