Letter: SOS will best benefit LGBTQA community

To the editor,In the heat of campaign season, we’ve all had a chance to look at the platforms of each ticket and analyze what each of these tickets brings to representing the student body. As a gay member of the Ohio University community, it’s clear to me that Serving Our Students (SOS) has my best interests at heart and plans to implement programs to benefit the whole of the LGBTQA community.One of the key platform points that will benefit the LGBTQA community from the SOS platform is the plan to incentivize Diversity, Inclusion and Safety workshops. In a perfect world, the student body at-large would willingly attend Safe Zone trainings, Bystander Intervention Trainings, ALICE trainings and other workshops which would promote professional and personal development in these areas, but this is simply not the case.SOS’ plan to implement a textbook scholarship upon completion of a number of these workshops as well as a certificate upon graduation will encourage the student body to participate in and retain the information from these workshops. This makes our campus more open and willing to have important conversations regarding sexual orientation and gender identity; makes our students more marketable to future employers; and makes sure our students are having money put back into their pockets.Another piece from the SOS platform which has direct benefits to the LGBTQA community is the plan to reach out to existing student organizations to appoint the Senators that sit on the LGBTQA commission as well as the other Diversity Affairs commissions. As it stands, these Senators are appointed by the executives. This sets a dangerous precedent of allowing the executives to appoint people to these commissions who are not a part of and have no stake in these communities. By reaching out to these organizations, you eliminate these risks and allow for increased representation of students spanning all sexual orientations and gender identities.SOS also plans to bring back programming weeks to Student Senate. The direct benefit to the LGBTQA community from this is the return of a well-advertised and large-scale Pride week. This event was very important to LGBTQA visibility on our campus and increased the sense of inclusion and belonging for members of the community at our university.While the points of the SOS platform which focus on the needs of the LGBTQA community are the primary reason our community should vote SOS this year, it should also be noted that members of the SOS ticket have been strong advocates for us in Student Senate. Many of them spoke heavily in favor of the Preferred Name Policy, which allows trans-identified students to use the names with which they identify without legally changing their names. They’ve looked at the concerns of incoming LGBTQA students in regard to roommates and have tried to make sure that each of these students is in a safe and comfortable living environment when they come to Ohio University.After looking critically at each of the platforms of the tickets vying for my vote, it’s clear that SOS is the ticket that will have the biggest positive impact on the LGBTQA community. I hope that the rest of the LGBTQA community will join me in voting for the ticket that will truly Serve Our Students.Jordan KelleyKelley is a sophomore studying integrated language arts major.