Western sophomore Sarah Ishmael doesn’t spend much time on campus anymore, although she takes 15 credits in Fairhaven College.
Ishmael said her friends were surprised to see her in the Viking Union Feb. 5, while she was waiting to attend a dinner with Western President Karen Morse. After dinner and a night’s rest in Bellingham, Ishmael heads to Olympia, so she can work on her independent research project with the Washington Student Lobby (WSL).
In addition to acting as Western’s legislative liaison to the WSL, Ishmael was recently elected vice president of recruitment and retention by the board of directors. In this position recently created by the WSL, Ishmael is responsible for recruiting new schools to join the WSL, in addition to keeping current member schools satisfied with the WSL as a whole.
Ishmael is one of many students working for the WSL, an organization whose current members include the six public universities in Washington and a few smaller colleges. One of the main purposes of the organization is to represent the collective interests of Washington students with local and state governments, Ishmael said.
In the past, the WSL has had to overcome a number of obstacles, including it's budget, said Erik Lowe, Western vice president for Legislative and Governmental Affairs.
However, the WSL came one step closer to financial stability last month when the WSL Board of Directors voted on a new funding structure for the organization, moving away from an annual $4,500 minimum per member organization to a plan requiring each school to pay $0.75 per full-time equivalent student.
With a current population of 12,220 full-time students, Western’s contribution to the WSL would be a $9,165 minimum under the proposed plan, Lowe said.
Associate Students (AS) President Ramiro Espinoza said Western has been paying the most out of any member school the past few years. Last year, Lowe said Western’s portion of the budget totaled $14,237.34, while Central Washington University paid the minimum contribution of $4500 due to budget constraints.
What the old plan didn’t take into account was the different sizes of the member schools and how much money the schools could afford to contribute to the WSL, Lowe said.
“The key issue is that Western has been carrying the weight of this organization and has done so for many years,” Lowe said.
The new plan is more fair in this sense, Lowe said. By charging member schools $0.75 per full-time equivalent student in the school, bigger institutions like the University of Washington and Washington State University pay more into the budget than a smaller college like Bellevue Community College.
Under the new plan, Western’s contribution would decrease $5,000 from 2006, allowing those funds to be used for other WSL activities on campus.
Ideally, support from the AS and these extra funds could be used to promote the WSL on the Western campus by getting the student body more involved with the government, Espinoza said.
“The AS is required to represent you,” Espinoza said. “If it’s in the students’ best interest to support the WSL, that’s what we’ll do.”
The proposed funding structure will get each member school to pay an equal share of the WSL budget, Espinoza said. It will not only provide stable funding, but it will make the organization more equitable for member schools and solidify the commitment of the member schools to the organization, he said.
Many people associated with the WSL, including WSL administrator Matthew Kreiling, share Espinoza’s belief that the proposed funding structure would be the first of many steps to making the WSL a more powerful force in Olympia.
“Last year, the WSL was responsible for getting a seven percent cap on tuition rate increases,” Kreiling said. “That’s quite high, but we still managed to make the cap.”
The only full-time staff member employed by the WSL, Kreiling graduated from the Evergreen State College and works in Olympia with WSL legislative liaisons from the member schools in Washington.
In his time with the WSL, Kreiling said he has seen the influence of the organization grow as its members have invested more time and money into it.
“The WSL is a highly effective lobbying organization, but it can only go so far if it doesn’t have the financial support and unity to back that up,” Kreiling said.
Although there have been inequalities in supporting the budget and a lot of work for a small staff, Ramiro said the outlook for the WSL is much better than it has ever been before thanks to the newly proposed funding structure.
“I don’t worry about the financial history between the schools,” Espinoza said. “Each school paying its equal share will make the WSL much stronger.”
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