On May 14th, sophomore Miranda Bance and junior Evan Barnes were elected co-chairs of the Student Technology Committee (STC) for the 2019 to 2020 school year. The committee has been active since the spring of 2018. Next year will be Barnes’ second year as chair of the committee.

STC was originally started because some tech-savvy students noticed the shortfalls of a new Google Chrome extension. Bance said, “The school put this extension in Chrome and just didn’t tell any of the students and so some of us who pay a little more attention to these things noticed it… and we sort of looked at some of the capabilities it had and we were worried about spyware and privacy and all that, so that was one of the big things.”

Bance and Barnes have plans to address tech issues that have arisen with all of the new technological resources that came with the Schilling Math and Science Center. “One of the main things we’re doing is we’re working with C3 to make some guidelines for the SMART boards because there’s some concerns with things that have been happening on them,” Barnes said. Continuing Barnes’ thought, Bance said that SMART board concerns are coming “both from students and faculty… students have gotten annoyed when they’ve been told off for doing something [on a SMART board], even though there’s nothing that explicitly prohibits them other that ‘we don’t want that.’ ”

Beyond this, STC’s new co-chairs plan to uphold its mission statement. Barnes said that part of the mission statement of STC is “to serve as a liaison between the students and the faculty and to promote tech literacy among the student body.”

Bance also noted the role they hope to have in the SPA community. “I think giving tech help, sort of as a midway point between the tech department [and the student body], because we know that people, in general some of them… are a little skeptical of the tech department, so then it’s just another way for us to help out and sort of bridge that gap,” she said.

Finally, Bance and Barnes aim to be inclusive and transparent. Bance said, “We meet over in the computer science room, 4110… and our meetings are all completely open, we encourage people to come… they can ask us questions about anything.”