The Missouri Southern Student Senate is still waiting on University President Julio León.

When a scheduled meeting between León and the Senate fell through last semester, questions were left unanswered. The senators aren’t happy that the meeting has not been rescheduled.

“It just feels like we’re not a very high priority,” said Valerie German, vice president of Student Senate. “It seems a little apathetic towards student organizations. And they [student organizations] are part of your education; the extra-curricular activities, the things that you delegate your time to.”

However, the Senate hasn’t stopped trying to get the meeting on their calendar.

“We have tried to reschedule, and we’ll continue to try,” said Jason Carr, president of Student Senate. “We were going to meet with him last meeting, but we never confirmed the date. It’s just a communication problem. We’ll call over there, and the secretary will write down the time we want, and the secretary will call back and say either ‘yes’ or ‘no.'”

“We’ll call it a communication breakdown,” German said.

Senators claim that the whole point of the meeting with León is to address things that are affecting the student body; for instance, the removal of ice from the campus walkways.

“The sidewalks weren’t any different Monday than they were last Wednesday,” said German.

“They haven’t done anything since the initial storm,” said Carr. “The storm stopped last Sunday. They had the entire week to clear the sidewalks. It did snow on Sunday, but that snow didn’t really do anything. Then Monday we come to school and 80 percent of the walkways were still covered.”

The Senate wants to discuss the proposal brought forward to ban smokers from smoking closer than 25 feet in front of any campus building.

“They haven’t done anything about the smoking proposal,” said Carr. “I thought they would definitely do something about that, out of respect for all the students and faculty that don’t smoke. But we didn’t hear anything back from the administration. I haven’t seen a single thing done.

“I think that after any organization tries several times to do something and gets no response from the administration, it’s really discouraging.”

German said that there are questions submitted by the student body last semester that still don’t have answers from León. She said that many of these questions will be irrelevant this semester, but they still need answers.

“The TB outbreak was really big back then,” said German. “They let that die down. There were a lot of things that people weren’t satisfied with and wanted answers to, but didn’t get them.

“There’s going to be a lot of things that are brought up with Dr. León that are old. How is he going to reference those things?”

Though there isn’t a date set for a meeting, the senators are sure that it is only a matter of time before León reschedules.

“It’s always nice to know we have a little respect for each other,” said Carr. “We certainly would like him to come. We hope that he would exchange that feeling.”

“If anything, at least we did our responsibility in conveying our information to him,” said German. “What he does with it is out of our hands. But we did our part.

“We told him how we felt and what people wanted to know. We are the representation of the student body. We have this information and we need to do our part in giving it to the administration.”

Southern’s Student Senate holds its regular meetings every Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. in on the third floor of the Billingsly Student Center.