MEMOIR

How I researched and wrote my first front page newspaper story: Part 2

I was ridiculed for my news tip suggestion. I carried on anyway.

For the first time I went to the Student Association offices where I asked the receptionist where I might find the travel budget expenses since the last SA election.

“They’re unavailable,” she said.

“Unavailable?”

Everyone in the office stopped at my surprised echoed reply to this ridiculousness.

Of course they were available, I said. The SA served the students. It was the Student’s Association. Like any other LCC student, I paid student fees, so I was an SA member and I wanted to see them.

Taken aback, she suggested the SA president could talk to me.

It was my first time in the Student Assocation president’s office. The president was a young black man, well groomed, dignified looking. He looked like an SA president. He habitually wore a tie, unusual for our school.

He listened to my questions politely. He said the details I wanted were unavailable.

He was holding some computer printouts, financial breakdowns of some sort.

May I see those?

No, these are private.

How are SA expenses decided?

By full council. Nothing is kept secret, no monies are unaccounted for.

Every expenditure is in the minutes?

Yes, of course.

Could I see the minutes?

He looked surprised.

“Certainly,” he said.

He pointed out where the minutes were kept, tacked on a bulletin board in a neat row.

“May I photocopy them?”

That was agreed. While I was photocopying, he came up to me and said, “Because your work is SA business, photocopies are free.”

I copied every page detailing financial expenditures, then took the papers to a cafeteria table to add up travel spending only. There was something puzzling about how the numbers added up. A phone call to one of the college accounting staff gave an answer that helped. Each college fiscal year ended June 30. A new fiscal year began July 1. With that, the numbers made more sense.

The SA elections had taken place in March, in the previous fiscal year. When I added up travel expenses taking this into account, surprising totals popped out. This SA administration hadn’t spent $7,500 on travel. They’d spent $19,000. They were almost $9,000 over budget.

I then interviewed the SA president in a large-windowed alcove at a section of cafeteria tables called the Brown Bag. A number of travel expense items were for generous, but standard, mileage claims by him for using his vehicle on business trips. While he was earnest in his answers and he genuinely tried to be helpful, I was hitting sore spots and it showed. But all the while we talked I was impressed how professional he looked in his red tie.

That night in AN1705, the First-Year typing room, I began typing my very first news story for publication on one of the baby Mac computers. As I worked, a pretty blonde female proctor came in and watched over my shoulder.

Proctors did the campus policing task of ensuring students in college computer rooms had a signed pass. I’ve since forgotten this proctor’s name and wish I could recall it, as we got along well. She was a business student and a proctor for a long while. She had long before stopped asking me for my pass. I was a regular, consistently working late hours. On her rounds, whenever she reached where I was working, she stopped to chat.

She said she knew something about the story I was working on. She and the SA president were both business students. He had formerly been the president of the business club. Three hundred dollars had gone missing once on a trip he had taken to Edmonton, she said. He replaced the money, but the club wasn’t cozy with him after that. When he was elected SA president, members of the business club objected to him being appointed “BOG rep,” she said.

I didn’t know what a BOG rep was. It was, she explained, the student representative to the College Board of Governors.

I now learned the college administration officials, our president and our college vice-presidents, weren’t the top dogs at the college. The college administration executive answered to the College Board of Governors, a group of citizens chosen from the community and from different areas of the college.

One student representative was a member of the Board of Governors. Student council nominated a student for BOG rep. Each actual BOG appointment was made by the Minister of Advanced Education. With that appointment, the student then became a full voting member of the College Board of Governors.

The proctor also told me how much money the SA played with each year. It should have been obvious. About 3,500 full-time students paid $92 per year in Student Association fees, providing our student council with a budget of roughly a third of a million dollars.

Out of that budget student recreation was paid for, including full and part-time college recreation staff. About a quarter of the funds went into an account called the “Building Trust Fund,” an account created years before to upgrade the Barn, a large, cavernous, older building renovated to serve student recreation and was the only place alcohol was served to students on campus. The Building Trust Fund evolved into a healthy SA savings account.

The next day I asked our journalism instructor, Georgia, about the student Board of Governors position, visiting her in her tiny closet of an office in the Criminal Justice area of the college, just down the hall from the Endeavor.

Years before Georgia had turned down a larger office, not wanting to be forced to share it later as the college population grew. Her every office shelf- many were short afterthoughts of shelves, added shelves that went right to the ceiling- were full of books, stacked papers, boxes and metal recipe file containers.

From one small high shelf Georgia pulled down a small metal box, opened it and went through a stack of recipe cards. She had on file who had been the student BOG rep for each of the past 23 years.

Most SA presidents over the previous two decades had been from Com Arts. But the most interesting discovery was that the BOG rep position and the SA president’s position were usually united, held by one and the same person. Georgia could only find three exceptions to that in 23 years. Georgia hunted for reasons in her files. One exception was because a student served a second term as BOG rep and only one term as president. The other exception Georgia knew from memory. An SA president many years before had allegedly been involved in drugs and student council voted to nominate someone else to the BOG. This year marked only the third time in more than two decades the positions were separated.

With this information I went back to the First-Year writing room and began typing out my story. I would submit it to the Second-Year students and the newpaper publisher and wait for their reviews. So far, the Second-Year students had not been kind.

Thanks for reading. This is Part 2 of how I got my first front page news story. I’ll publish Part 3 tomorrow. I guess the lesson here is persistance pays. Sometimes you have to jump some hurdles.