Most students at this school have no experience with student government.It seems to me that most believe that the people who represent them at the various educational board meetings and who sponsor the events on campus don’t really do anything important. I can’t completely say I disagree, but I do believe that our Associated Students of Skyline College has a purpose on our campus, and they do it well.There are basically three roles the ASSC performs on our campus. The first is sponsoring events. Practically every event that occurs on campus has to first get through the ASSC. This hopefully ensures that the events on campus have to meet minimum standards, such as providing a discount to Skyline students or making sure it is something the students want.The second duty of the ASSC is club communication. While the Skyline Organization and Club Council is not technically an arm of the ASSC it is headed by the Vice-President of the ASSC who chooses the meeting times and sets the agenda. SOCC gives each club five hundred dollars each semester for attending at least three meetings, and while this may not seem like much, it doesn’t have to be used that semester and it can add up over time.Furthermore the ASSC itself gives out money to clubs in the form of grants which are limited to one thousand dollars per year to each club at a request. This can enable a club to go on field trip, such as the newspaper staff going to JACC.The third duty of the ASSC involves representation. At basically all of the meetings that involve the students of Skyline College the ASSC is supposed to be there to give us a voice that can be heard by teachers and administrators. Often the meetings that people in the ASSC go to are quite important. The health and safety meetings are an example of this, one of those meetings determined whether we would have security cameras on campus, and are always supposed to have a member there. The ASSC also allows students on campus to represent themselves.The ASSC meets every Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. and at the beginning of every meeting there is a period of time where students can walk in and speak in front of the ASSC for around 5 minutes. Anyone can, you don’t have to be a teacher or a representative from some place, but just a normal student telling the ASSC what a good job they’ve been doing… or not.Let me start by saying I like our ASSC. They have worked very hard this semester and seem to be able to get things done fairly and quickly. However, I don’t think they are able to help the campus that much. I’d prefer a greater student voice on this campus, but the students on this campus really don’t deserve it. No one cares about anything here, and that is the core issue facing the ASSC, with interest almost non-existent.The only way I think the ASSC can fix this is through increased representation and outreach. They need to find some way to associate more students with themselves by doing more events for students that are sponsored by the ASSC and forming more clubs to reach out to students. This is going to become more and more important with each semester as we head into financial difficulties with shrinking budgets.