Newcomers win SGA’s top slots:
Jones and Hunt want to focus on community

By Nathan Walls
Editor

Even though Vanessa Jones and Anthony Hunt have no student government experience, they were elected SGA President and Vice President March 24 for the 2004-05 school year.

The UNCP student body voted on March 23 and 24 and President-elect Jones and Vice President-elect Hunt were announced the victors of the election at an SGA meeting Wednesday night. They defeated opponents Andrea Miyagi and Scott Ammons by a 317 to 257-vote tally, one of the largest voter turnouts in UNCP history.

Miyagi, currently a junior senator, and Ammons, an at-large senator, have nearly five years of student government experience between them but Hunt was not surprised that he and Jones won.

“It’s not necessarily surprising because I knew I had a lot of support,” Hunt said. “I’m just really, really appreciative that they (the students) supported me enough to represent them next year.”

Jones said she was relieved and happy to get students’ support.

She already has some ideas in mind for next year.

“First of all, I would like to increase school spirit,” Jones said. “Our school spirit here at Pembroke right now is not very high. As you saw at Homecoming, like our events, nobody really wanted to participate in any of the things we had on campus and we have a lot going on, on campus. I have thought of some ways of bringing that to view. Like game show things, nobody wants to come to that, but that’s only once a year and that’s actually really fun. We want to increase the other things like the movies we already have out here. Instead of just making it Wednesday and Saturday nights, why can’t we make it like every Friday? We can show more than one movie at a time.”

Hunt wants to focus on several community projects.

“We want to try and increase the community,” Hunt said. “We want to try and get some of the students out into the community to try and help the town’s image. It’s a bad town image. We would like to have businesses that want to stay. We pretty much want to try to get students more involved in recycling programs around the town and town cleanups and stuff like that.”

Hunt also said that STD awareness workshops were a plan of his for Pembroke.

Ammons is considering not returning to the SGA next year.

“I have two more years of eligibility remaining and I feel like my time with serving in a student government capacity is up,” Ammons said.

Miyagi, this year’s Homecoming Queen, is unsure of her future with the SGA, also.

“As of right now, it’s too soon to tell,” Miyagi said.

Ammons and Miyagi’s thoughts on leaving are unrelated to the election, however.

Ammons did extend compliments to Jones and Hunt, however.

“Like anyone else, I hate to lose, but I feel like Vanessa and Anthony will do a good job and I wish them the best,” Ammons said.