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| Mance elected to national
board of SSDP |
David Forbes
SGA Beat
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Peter Larkins | The Appalachian Senior Ian Mance, an off-campus
Student Government Association senator and recently elected SSDP
national board of directors member from Charleston, S.C., talks
to Judy Hass, director of Judicial Affairs at Appalachian State
University, about new drug legislation
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Off-campus Student
Government Association (SGA) senator Ian A. Mance has worked on
issues ranging from free speech “zones” to student fee
increases, but it was one topic in particular that got him into
student government in the first place.
This topic was drug policy, in particular repealing
the drug provision of the Higher Education Act (HEA), which prevents
students with a drug conviction from getting financial aid.
“That was the one thing that motivated me
to join SGA. Then after that I liked what we were able to accomplish
in senate and felt it was a good avenue to get things done,”
Mance said Thursday.
Now, Mance has the opportunity to work on this
issue at a national level. He was recently elected to the national
board of directors for Students for a Sensible Drug Policy (SSDP),
a large, growing student group with over 200 chapters nationwide. |
The issue is one with which Mance has a long
history. Shortly after coming to Appalachian State University
and joining the campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties
Union (ACLU), he became embroiled in a movement to get a piece
of legislation through SGA that would recommend overturning the
drug provision.
“It failed by two votes; none of us were
very familiar with SGA at the time, and we didn’t realize
how much opposition there was going to be. After it failed, we
felt really motivated, so we began networking with the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the
Green Party. A lot of ACLU members joined SGA; I joined SGA at
that time,” Mance said.
Mance, along with then-senators Ryan M. Eller
and Paul A. Funderburk, drafted the new legislation and launched
an educational campaign. The bill passed the second time.
“Almost every issue, Ian and I have worked
with each other. I respect him a lot,” said fellow off-campus
senator H. Dustin Bayard. “If there’s ever a good cause,
Ian is one of the most vocal people about it and the most willing
to take action.”
“We didn’t feel like it was enough
of a statement for just the SGA to pass it, so Bayard and I went
to [Chancellor Francis Borkowski] and made our case for why we
thought the drug provision was discriminatory, unjust and counter-productive,
and he agreed, much to our surprise,” Mance said.
While Appalachian was the 51st student government
to pass legislation against the provision, Borkowski is still
only one of two chancellors nationwide to publicly call for the
provision’s repeal.
That attracted the notice of the national SSDP,
which invited Mance, Bayard and several other senators to attend
their national conference last November in Washington, D.C.
“That was what separated us from a lot
of the other student governments, that we went to the next step
and got our chancellor to come out against it,” Mance said.
“That was the end of our involvement until a few weeks ago,
when I was asked to come speak at the SSDP conference. They felt
our experiences here at Appalachian were unique, that most other
student governments hadn’t met as much resistance as we had
on our campus and that they wanted me to detail our strategies.”
After the presentation, Mance was nominated
and elected to be on the national board of directors for SSDP.
The job of the 14-member board is to set the
national agenda for the organization as a whole.
“We have a board member in Las Vegas,
one in Berkeley, members in Minneapolis, New York, and D.C., even
in Miami, so we have members spread out across the entire country,”
Mance said. “As a new member, it’s still pretty overwhelming
to me, and I still don’t have a complete grasp on what being
a board member entails. But I’m learning and talking to some
of the current members, and they’re filling me in.”
According to SSDP bylaws, the board is required
to meet four times a year in person and keep in touch through
conference calls.
Mance said as a member of the national board,
he would like to see SSDP expand into more service areas, including
helping families with a member in jail due to the drug war, an
idea he credits to Bayard.
“I’d like to see SSDP become an organization
known not just for lobbying but also for service work; I think
it would lend credibility to the organization and help a lot of
people who need it,” Mance said.
The SSDP started three years ago at the Rochester
Institute of Technology, according to the group’s Web site.
Currently made up of college students, the group plans to expand
into high schools as well, especially after a recent Supreme Court
ruling allowing random drug testing of any high school student
involved in extra-curricular activities.
Mance said he would like to see an SSDP chapter
on Appalachian’s campus in the future.
“Students have registered chapters in
the past, but for one reason or another we still don’t have
one. I think there’s a lot of good that could be done by
a chapter on campus. I realized there doesn’t have to be
a big issue in the town; there’s a lot of proactive things
that could be done.”
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