Lasting only 22 minutes, the Student Senate had a short meeting on Oct. 12 in comparison to its first three meetings.

“That’s the way there going to be usually,” said Eric Norris, Senate president. “I was real surprised the first three weeks went so long. But, just trying to get organized takes a long time, but most of the time when we’re settled in, it’ll only be about thirty minutes long.”

During the meeting, one of the four empty seats was filled with one of the candidates postponed from last week.

The vacancy committee also had three other candidates, but none of the candidates showed up to the meeting.

Also, there were two new allocations brought up for their first reading.

One was $1,000 for 10 students to attend the American Model United Nations conference in Chicago, where the students will represent Nigeria in the general assembly.

The other was for $1,000 for 20 members of the Kinesiology Club to attend the Missouri Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance state convention on Nov. 11-13.

The Senate did, however, allocate $369 for three students to attend the Student American Dental Hygiene conference in Osage beach for two days.

The Senate had $10,605 left in its budget before the meeting started.

“Better things are yet to come from Senate,” Norris said.

“Right now, we’re leaps and bounds better than last year.”

Norris compared this year to last year.

“Last year there were a lot of meetings where we came real close to not even having a quorum,” he said. “To have nearly every seat full and only be four short of a full Senate is another goal we set to meet.”

He also said he was proud of the senators and just hopes he can continue to have good turnouts for meetings. He also said the committees have been going better than they have in the past and he just wants to thank his senators for all their hard work.

Four senators were officially removed this week for absences. The students were Amanda Powell, Rhonda Wheeler, Liz Bartholet and Dan Fedewa.

Also not present were Nahal Chitsazan and Merrill Soundararajan.

In total, there were 30 senators and two officers present.