A staff member can become an at-large representative in several ways, but the purpose of the position is to help represent staff in unrepresented districts. The district number will always begin with "999".
Staff Council bylaws stipulate there can only be up to 5 at-large reps. If there are more people who volunteer than there are spaces available, the Parliamentarian will ask each candidate to submit information about why they want to be an at-large rep. The Executive Committee will then review the submissions and choose the new at-large reps. Preference is given to previous Staff Council Representatives who have shown they are active participants.
Expectations and Duties
As an at-large rep the expectations are very similar to those of a “regular” representative. At-large representatives still attend meetings, serve on committees, and communicate with our constituents. Your district number will always begin with "999".
Three are three big differences between regular reps and at-large reps:
- Your term is only one year and will always end in May. Depending on how many years you’ve been with Staff Council and whether your district has a vacancy, you can run again next year as either a regular rep or an at-large rep. (Our term limit is 4 consecutive years in any position)
- Instead of having a specific district to represent, you help represent “unrepresented” districts. Unrepresented districts are those who have NO representatives. Our goal is to keep the number of unrepresented districts very small, so there may only be 5-10 groups. What that means in practice is that you help send emails using Regroup to those districts because they don’t have anyone else communicating with them.
- Each year the at-large reps discuss how they want to do communication. Some groups prefer to have one volunteer send all the emails to all the unrepresented districts, while other groups prefer to take a district or two as their own.
- You will start receiving a whole bunch of emails that you can safely ignore. Because you are an at-large rep, you have the ability to send emails to ANY district. That’s awesome, but it also means you will start receiving “approval” emails for all district emails as well.
- Our rule of thumb is: If you didn’t create the email, don’t approve the email. Just delete the message.
Access to technology
Frequently at-large representatives get added at a time outside the regular election cycle. This means there may be a delay in when you get appointed as an at-large rep and when you get access granted to Regroup, UT Box, the wiki, or other platforms. If it has been more than a couple of weeks since you were appointed and you don't have the permissions you need or you are not listed on the List of Current Representatives page, please contact the Parliamentarian to get this corrected.