On Tuesday, Oct. 3, the El Camino Academic Senate met to discuss future plans, approvals, and budgets.

Ross Miyashiro, newly appointed vice president of student services at EC, discussed the design of new Student Services Building that is currently in construction.

“We are going to try and reformat it to make it much more intuitive for students when they walk in the front door,” Miyashiro said. “We want to make it as easy as possible for students to attend El Camino College.”

A spring lockdown drill was also discussed by EC Police Chief Michael Trevis, who made a proposal for two possible dates for the drill to occur.

The first date of the drill will be week three of the spring semester on Thursday, March 1 and the second date will be in week five on Thursday, March 15.

The committee took a straw poll for the date the drill will be held on and it was a 12-13 vote in favor of the Thursday, Mar. 15 date.

“I’m going to take to my boss the recommendation of March the 15th being preferred,” Trevis said.

Jane Miyashiro, vice president of human resources, spoke about the job announcements for faculty and how they can improve.

“I would really like us to really take a look at our job announcements particularly for faculty,” Miyashiro said “I want it to be more equity minded in the language that we use.”

Miyashiro also proposed initiatives for better technology in the human resource department.

“I was really shocked at like things like time sheets that are still paper based” Miyashiro said. “I have a lot of ideas about improving the technology in our world.”

Andrea Sala and Nancy Tonner, who represented the ECC foundation for Student Scholarships, announced that letters of recommendation will now be called evaluations.

“We’re no longer calling it a letter of recommendation because there is no letter required anymore” Sala said “We changed that this year because we heard a lot of feedback that it takes a lot of time”

For evaluations for students, professors will judge that student based on five qualities which are academic performance, creativity and originality, Intellectual Curiosity, character, responsibility and reliability.

“Those are the five areas and all you have to do is judge them on a drop down menu” Sala said. “Excellent, good, fair, poor, there’s five different things (qualities).”

Vice President of Academic Technology Peter Marcoux announced an academic technology meeting on Thursday, Oct. 5.

“We have a academic technology meeting on Thursday,” Marcoux said. “We’re gonna be talking about signing up to be google for education campus”

According to Marcoux, if El Camino were to buy 35 Google Chromebooks with a charging cart and a printer, it would cost $11,000 per class room.

“It probably costs us 40 to 50 grand per class with the current computers,” Marcoux said. “They are much cheaper.”

ASO president, Bryan Odega thought the meeting was a successful one.

“The meeting today went very well, very informative,” Odega said.

Daniel Berney of the fine arts department also shared a positive sentiment regarding the meeting.

“It’s always completely informative, on task and (I’m) proud to be a part of it,” Berney said.