Condom task force meets
March 7, 2008
The Sexual Health and Safety Products Task Force met Tuesday to discuss a plan to make contraceptives available for free in MU’s residence halls.
Residential Life Director Frankie Minor and Student Health Center Director Susan Even met with the task force and representatives of student groups.
The meeting included representatives from the Residence Halls Association, the Missouri Students Association and the Legion of Black Collegians.
Representatives from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Questioning Resource Center and Sexual Health Advocate Peer Education were also present.
The task force met to discuss an agenda for the upcoming semester.
“We’re still at the very beginning,” Even said. “We’re still trying to identify the students that are going to represent the student groups that need to be involved in the process. The meeting was a meeting to review the charge from the chancellor and to reconvene a group of students to help with the implementation.”
The task force met to determine how they would meet five conditions set by Chancellor Brady Deaton to implement the plan, MSA Vice President Chelsea Johnson said.
Deaton said in a letter to Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Cathy Scroggs that the plan should not use university funds, the contraceptive dispensers must be tamper-proof and private, the dispensers must be requested by each residence hall government, MU will conduct an independent evaluation of the program’s success, and at least one campus student organization must be involved.
The task force’s primary goal Tuesday night was to make an agenda, Johnson said. She said the group would meet to discuss locations of dispensers, types of machines and funding and to identify other organizations that could be part of the task force.
Although no implementation timeline has been created yet, Johnson said she is relatively pleased with the progress made so far.
“It’s going smoothly,” Johnson said. “We all hope, though, that it goes quickly. I think everyone is willing to work hard enough to see that it does happen.”
While the task force began planning the agenda to fulfill all of Deaton’s requirements, Scroggs said the students would bring the plan to completion.
“All along we’ve looked at it as a health issue for our students and believed they ought to be involved in deciding what they wanted in their living units,” Scroggs said. “What we’ve done is said to them, if this is a major issue for you, then you need to make it your own.”
The task force debated the positives and negatives of implementing what is a sensitive issue for some, task force RHA representative Blake Lawrence said.
“Administration and the people who run these halls work for us,” Lawrence said. “All along the way, everybody in charge has been very sensitive to student opinion. We’ve tried bringing all kinds of different people from every kind of affiliation on campus.”
Scroggs stressed the importance of this being a student-run process because it is an “emotional issue.”
“We want it to be a learning opportunity for them,” she said. “It might help them understand sort of the sensitivities their peers have. It may also help them learn to be more tolerant and more sensitive to people who may have questions, concerns or differing opinions.”
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