Georgia Southern’s Student Government Association has recently been in deliberations regarding the use and future inner-workings of the well-known Shuttle Gus service.

This past week at the regularly scheduled SGA meeting, a discussion was brought to the floor pertaining to the future policies regarding who would be in charge of Shuttle Gus administration each weekend.

For those who may not be familiar with what exactly Shuttle Gus is, it is a service the SGA provides in collaboration with other organizations around campus to offer free rides to students all over Statesboro on Friday and Saturday nights from 10 p.m.- 2 a.m. The organizations sign up in advance for a specific weekend and they are paid 300 dollars to volunteer. Three vehicles are rented out of SGA’s operational budget every weekend.

The initial discussion was brought to the floor by SGA’s graduate assistant Ben Dyer, who stated that the responsibility of handling the heavy lifting of Shuttle Gus would no longer fall directly on the shoulders of the executive board. This included the President, Azell Francis, Vice President, Ellen Hogan, and various other VPs of specific departments.

“The exec board actually runs Shuttle Gus for the first weekend of every semester, so we actually drive that weekend and take calls. All weeks after, the volunteering organizations drive and answer calls, and as an SGA member, their specific role is just to represent and make sure everything runs smoothly,” Francis said. 

“Each college will now be responsible for an entire weekend, twice this semester,” Dyer said. Initially, an otherwise negative reaction from the majority of senators-each college is represented by six senators- was heard; however, in the end policies were agreed upon and SGA was able to implement and introduce the new system to its public board. “We wanted to make sure that, as an organization, we were doing things as efficiently and effectively as possible. So with that we decided to empower our senators to allow them to really fulfill their responsibilities,” Francis said.

The policy was voted on and has been effective as of last Friday.

“It doesn’t affect Shuttle Gus as a program, it only affects how it is internally ran,” Francis said. The senators, on their respective weekends, are the primary supervisors on site–a pavilion that they run Shuttle Gus out of. They meet with the volunteering organization on those nights and just overhead supervise to take calls and assist in ensuring the safety of the vehicles and students.

As far as the disagreements during the SGA meeting, Francis felt that as they are supposed to be the voice of the entire student body, sometimes it can be beneficial to not always agree on bigger decisions such as this that must be made. Conversation allowed them to make sure this was the right decision for everyone at the time.

“I want the senators to make sure they remember the ‘why’ and that they promised to serve students– that a senator should be the best representative of students possible.”