USG proposes adding health resources to USCard

The USG Senate meeting Tuesday night centered around a common theme: an emphasis on the support of the wellness and safety of USC students.

USG Vice President Austin Dunn gave an update on the advocacy branch’s projects. Some major updates in academics include being able to view a course’s syllabus during class registration and a survey to assess the competency of course plans given to students by their advisers. In the wellness affairs area of the advocacy branch, major points of discussion were long health center wait times and medical excuses from classes. The issue of students simply trying to get out of doing work with a doctor’s note led to questions about the adequacy of doctor’s notes and what to do if that excuse was not sufficient for a professor.

Director of Communications Luke Southwell-Chan also provided an update on the projects that the communications branch of USC is working on. Next week will be Sexual Assault Awareness Week, which will involve a collaboration with other Pac-12 schools. The communications branch will also work on promoting upcoming elections and transferring the website to the cloud.

Senator Tyler Matheson proposed removing the paragraph on USCards that defines the card as property of USC in favor of adding mental health resource information to the card. Specifically, the back of the card would include numbers for DPS, the counseling center and Relationship and Sexual Violence Prevention and Services.

However, Matheson acknowledged concerns that the change would make it difficult to validate the validity of the cards.

“There’s a way to work around that with SCampus, and there are many other universities that don’t have [the identification as property of the campus] on there,” Matheson said. “If this gets pushed to administration, that would be their biggest concern.”

Matheson’s proposal will be debated further by the Senate at next week’s meeting.