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by EMILY MELTON
News Reporter
The Student Government Association expanded its medical amnesty policy during the student senate meeting March 17.
According to the resolution of policy, the original medical amnesty policy shielded on-campus students from judicial repercussions from Appalachian State University if they call for medical assistance in an alcohol-related emergency.
The new legislation
extends the policy to off-campus students and was proposed by Matt R.
Tyndall, Lovill Hall senator and freshman political science major.
“I guess
the main initiative for passing that this year was just to have more of
a uniform policy,” he said. “If this is something that we’re going to
acknowledge, why have it for only one group of people and not another
group of people?”
Like the old policy, medical amnesty may only be used once and those who use it must attend counseling sessions.
“It’s
pretty straightforward,” Tyndall said. “I picked up from where
everybody left off last year and just added more to extend it to
include all undergraduate students.”
Matt S. Moseley, director of Campus Outreach and sophomore marketing major helped write the original policy.
“The
Student Government Association represents all undergraduate students,
and we felt like if on-campus students had a need for a medical amnesty
policy, then it only followed that off-campus students be treated the
same way by the university in alcohol-emergency situations,” he said.
Last
year, when the original policy was written, Appalachian had not yet
established an off-campus violation policy, in which students who
received off-campus violations would face additional repercussions
through the university.
“Essentially,
what happened was last year, when the medical amnesty piece was
written, at the same time the university was kind of going through a
phase where it was deciding what its off-campus violation policy would
be,” Moseley said.
Therefore,
SGA left off-campus students out of the policy and decided to return to
the issue this year to extend the policy to off-campus students if
necessary.
Both
Tyndall and Moseley are meeting with the Office of Student Conduct this
month and hope the policy will be in effect when the next school year
begins.
“Right
now, at the time, we’re trying to push the administration to accept
medical amnesty, and now that there’s a bill out there that calls for
off-campus and on-campus [policy], they should both go into effect at
the same time,” Moseley said.
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