Students ask lawmakers for deferred maintenance money
5:38 p.m. Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Wednesday, university students took an oversized check to the Capitol. “We present the state legislature with a check for $408-million,” stated Pittsburg State University student Ginger Niemann.
The students weren't actually giving the chunk of change to lawmakers.
“This check represents the students investment in higher education,” Niemann explained.
It’s an investment the students say keeps growing, as state funding for universities shrinks. It's a problem they wanted to talk to lawmakers about in person.
“I just had some students in the office about 15 minutes ago,” State Representative Sharon Schwartz explained.
Schwartz spoke to the students about what they could do to help the state solve the campus crisis.
“I asked them if they'd actually brain-stormed on their own. [They're] young, bright minds and they should maybe come up with some ideas themselves,” Schwartz said.
Schwartz says she is interested in making sure state universities, and the students who attend them, get the funding they need for the maintenance mess, but she says money is tight and it's a constant tug of war between competing interests.
"Where I'm at right now is still trying to find ways, besides tax increases, to address those on-going things,” Schwartz added.
And that's going to take some time. But Schwartz says that doesn't mean it's not a priority. It just means the students and universities need to have faith that lawmakers are doing what they can to remedy the problem, and to put measures into place that will keep the maintenance backlog from building up in the future.
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