Minutes
Feb. 20th, 2006
Well, Ursula and Morgan and I went ahead and met--what we came up with is pretty tentative because it was only the three of us, so pipe up if you disagree with anything or whatever. And the first thing we said was that from now on we'll assume we're meeting unless we settle it otherwise so we can avoid a repeat of this kind of thing. Unless, of course, y'all disagree with that! :)
The roundtable this Friday:
We talked about handing out buttons and quartersheets at the door--since many of our people may not have picked one up yet, and in order to recruit among those who haven't heard of us yet. We wondered if this might bother the GPSO etc., but decided to try it unless they ask us to knock it off or something. Elizabeth will draft a quartersheet and will definitely plan to be at the door handing them out with whoever else wants to & is able to make it. Morgan said that he was under the impression that Adrianne was going to go ahead and pick up the buttons from the NoSweat! office to replenish the bag in her mailbox [is this true, Adrianne?], so I guess we'll figure out over email what would be the easiest way to get some buttons to the meeting.
We talked about having some questions prepared that we want to ask as the GEO, or maybe an argument that we want to make, but weren't sure what exactly those would be. We agreed to ask Adrianne & the health committee for help/guidance on this; Ursula will email Adrianne. Some ideas we came up with:
-What kinds of costs they have that they are willing to cover instead of our health insurance -give them some of their own language, e.g. they say they can't afford increase but we can't afford it either! They are on a tight budget--we are on a tighter budget!
(Note that we may have to make the sub-point that decreases in benefits are basically the same thing as asking us to pay more since the money ultimately comes out of grad students' pockets--it's just a question of which grad students and when.)
We wondered if the health committee would want to meet with us before the meeting--possibly at 10 am on Friday? Possibly another time between now and then?
We also talked about the idea of planning something around the subcommittee meeting in late Feb. that Julie mentioned, instead of/in addition to the next full committee meeting--because the subcommittee meeting happens before the budget deadline whereas the full committee meeting doesn't. But we don't know if 1) the subcommittee meeting is the kind of thing that would be effective to plan an action around, or 2) if it's too soon to try to plan anything, or 3) if people would come out so soon after this thing on Friday.
Elizabeth had forgotten to ask about tabling in the School of Ed, so she will do that this week.
And there you have it.