Student Senate’s first vote of the spring semester approved Student Body President Jake Torres’ nomination of Joe Gaasbeck (Lyle) for Speaker of the Senate.

Gaasbeck replaces Laura Schur. Schur had to step down from her position as Speaker, which she held during the fall term, because of a conflict.

Gaasbeck’s promotion means that his Lyle seat is now vacant.

At least 11 seats are still vacant. The exact number cannot be confirmed until Student Body Secretary Katie Perkins finalizes and releases the member roster.

Membership Chair Roza Essaw told Senate that her committee would be conducting interviews on Thursday to fill those empty seats. She’s hoping that the seats can be filled in February.

One seat was filled during the meeting. Soniyyah Blue will serve as a senator for the Perkins School of Theology.

Alex Ehmke (Dedman II) introduced two pieces of legislation during the meeting. The first piece of legislation would change the finance committee’s budgeting process.

Instead of having annual budgets, Ehmke’s bill proposes that the budgeting process be done on a semester basis. Senate’s allocated student fees would be split into two groups, one for each semester.

Organizations would be allocated money for a fall budget. Any money not used during the fall would be given back to Senate. Organizations would then go through a spring budget process.

The main reason Ehmke, a finance committee member, is proposing these changes is that more money is spent during the spring semester than the fall, but organizations get their annual budget during the fall.

This means that many organizations save their money until the spring. The problem arises when an organization doesn’t spend all of their allotted money during the year. Unused money goes back to SMU at the end of the year, not Student Senate.

If an organization doesn’t use all of its money by the end of the year, then there’s no opportunity to give that money to another organization that could have used it during the year.

“A lot of money sits around for the whole year,” Finance Chair Janet Leung said.

Leung said the changes would allow Senate to give more money to active organizations because less-active organizations would not tie up unused funds in their bank accounts.

“I think that every single organization that you could, that you would want to know would benefit from this process,” Ehmke said, especially “all those organizations that came before Finance Committee this year, which there are dozens, where we said to them ‘We think what you’re doing is worthwhile, we wish we could fund it, but because we have scarce resources, we are unable to give you the funding you deserve despite the fact that we’d really, really like to.'”

Ehmke’s second bill requests that notations for ‘A-plus’ be included in student transcripts. His bill would not alter the current grade point system; GPAs would still be on a 4.0 scale.

The A-plus notations would help students applying to law or medical school, Ehmke explained, by giving them a leg up in the competition since many schools take ‘A-plus’ notations into account during admissions.

“I’m not wanting to adjust the GPA system,” Ehmke said. “I just want to change notation.”