Issue: Expulsion Policy
New Paltz is an organism. The wiki is the brain.
[edit] The History of The Movement To End the Current SUNY New Paltz Drug Expulsion Policy
The two protests that took place in April 2005 were the tip of the fire in all the efforts last year to end the policy the most draconian drug policy out of all the SUNY schools. The movement against the policy started at the beginning of last school year, when I was still a new college attendee at the start of my freshman year. The initial things NORML/SSDP attempted to do to change the policy were advocating for resolutions to be passed in the student senate and getting a large amount of students’ signatures on a petition. Two resolutions in the student senate followed, the second of which had an overwhelming majority of senators vote to repeal the expulsion policy. I had personally collected 150 signatures for that petition, which was the second most that anybody had collected, being dwarfed by someone who collected 500. The first major expulsion policy protest was a culmination of all these efforts. The 800 + signatures were taped to the lobby windows of the Haggerty Administration Building behind a podium and 250 students. Rob Robinson, who is now the director of NORML in New York State, and the advisor for New Paltz Norml/SSDP, was the MC for the event, and many village politicians and student leaders also showed their support. Mayor Jason West, Village Trustee Michael Zierler, County Legislator Hector Rodriguez, Student Senate Chair and New Paltz NORML/SSDP President Justin Holmes, Student Senator Jenny Loeb, me and many others spoke in protest of this policy. The result of this protest was media coverage in the New Paltz Times, The Poughkeepsie Journal, the Times Herald Record, and of course The Oracle. The administrators of the school therefore agreed to have a meeting with the instigators of the protest where they refused to even negotiate the distance of an inch. The activists who worked on this effort for the whole year were extremely frustrated and angry with an administration that refused to negotiate an inch on an issue for which a gigantic array of student support was organized and displayed. Then the summer came along, and the people who felt passionately about changing this policy had to wait for round 2. The first blow of the new school year was dealt by the activists’ adversaries, when more students were arrested in the first weekend of the school year then were all of the entire year before. Where exactly the push for this new New Paltz police state came from is unknown to the activists at large, but whoever did advocate for it obviously has sadistic inclinations to the students of New Paltz. Whoever advocated for the police state only did so because it was an unfavorable idea to the students of this school which obviously shows a very twisted nature.
