ASG Senators vote to rescind more than 30 Recognized Student Organizations in a unanimous vote Sept. 24 in the Kanza Room of the Memorial Union. The student fees that had been allocated to these groups will be put back into the reserve fund where RSOs may request to use it. Kelsey Ryan/The Bulletin

Associated Student Government rescinded more than 30 student organizations in a unanimous vote on Sept. 24. The funds that these groups were receiving will go back into the reserve fund account where recognized student organizations can apply to use it.

“Once it is signed by the ASG Vice President, ASG President and President Lane, it will be official legislation,” said Whitney McGinnis, ASG graduate assistant. “But we look at it now as if they have been officially rescinded.”

Starting last April and continuing this year, ASG said it contacted all student organizations to find out if they were still active. There were about 10 groups that wanted to be rescinded because they were no longer organizations, and the other groups that make up the rescinded list are groups that did not respond to ASG’s attempts to contact them.

“The general gist of the bill is so that we have an idea of who is official representation of Emporia State University,” said Jonathan Krueger, ASG president and senior political science major. “It’s kind of trying to get us back on a clean start. There were several organizations that were rescinded that quite simply stated that they didn’t really have any intention of staying a student organization anymore, it’s kind of a way to make sure we’re offering student organizations to our population that are active.

“If we have a list of 140 student organizations that we give to potential students, we want to make sure that those organizations are actually available for people to join and aren’t some mystical group that’s just floating out in space that we know nothing about.”

Krueger said that a major problem in contacting organizations was that so many of them had few members or had gotten new leadership and not re-submitted the required form to ASG.

“Unfortunately, one of the difficulties is if there were a couple of years where a group isn’t looked after or leadership changes and nobody passes along the information, then we don’t get the updated information either,” Krueger said. “So we’re contacting people that potentially graduated or are no longer involved and we have no idea who else to contact.”

This was the case for the Korean Student Association. It is still active and recently was involved in the International Food Festival, but the contact information that it had listed with ASG wasn’t current. ASG was unable to easily contact the organization and so the Korean Student Association was placed on the list to be rescinded.

“Nobody has contacted me, I didn’t know we were being rescinded,” said Jiho Kim, sophomore nursing major and current president of the Korean Student Association. “I’m kind of surprised.”

This is an example of issues that will arise. Krueger said that those groups that were not contacted and have been rescinded will most likely find out when they ask for funds. At that point, the group will be asked to go through the re-recognition process.

However, Krueger stated that ASG contacted each group in multiple ways, so he thinks that it is unlikely there will be groups that did not realize they were rescinded.

“If there are groups that believe that they are still a recognized student organization after the passage of this bill, that would be something that we would have to sit down and talk to them about,” Krueger said. “As far as I know, I’m fairly certain that every group has been contacted in some manner or another. It wouldn’t have been an instance where we failed to get in contact with someone because of an error in part on our lack of effort.”

Another issue that arose was that these groups, while not active, are still on the list to receive allocations from student fees.

“If any of the organizations on the list received money through the allocations process they would lose any money that they received,” McGinnis said.

Regardless, the rescinded organizations will be able to re-gain funding if they go through the re-recognition process.

“The money will go back into reserve fund, and there is an opportunity that if they go through the re-recognition process that they can file a reserve fund request and ask for that money back,” Krueger said. “So we’re not carte blanche saying ‘you can’t have the money’ we’re saying ‘until you go through the steps to become re-recognized by us we are going to hold that money back.’”

Krueger said that he currently does not have an estimate of how much money will be pulled back into the reserve fund account, but will know by next week.

Sarah Shaw/The Bulletin

Send article as PDF to