By Nicole Murphy
NAITSA
The NAIT Students’ Association (NAITSA) has launched an online form that lets anyone on campus give anonymous feedback on how budget cuts are being put into effect.
The form is called Sourcing Our Solutions (S.O.S) and has three sections. Green is for people who have ideas on how to make or save money and yellow is to voice worries or concerns. The red section is for individuals who’ve have personal experiences they believe are not acceptable in relation to how budget cuts have been carried out. The online form can be found at naitsa.ca/feedback.
“We want to hear what students’ actual concerns are because we are only four students from the business program and it is really tough to know what is happening with students in trades, health sciences or digital media [about] what their concerns are in their building or within their programs,” said Aleksandra Jaruga, VP External.
The Student Executive Council came up with this form to help gather information to better advocate for students at NAIT. In roughly a week they have had around 35 responses from students and staff in all three comment areas.
“If something is super specific we might not take the specifics of the comment, but we are looking for larger general themes to look into,” said Jaruga.
So far the majority of comments have been voicing concerns over tuition increases and paying more mandatory fees. NAITSA is using S.O.S as a tool so they can put together all recurring concerns and ideas to present to NAIT and the Minister of Education.
“We can’t advocate for students or fight for students if they don’t tell us what their issues or problems are because we’re not there,” said Jaruga.
