Jay Shearrow and Salina Edwards will be the new Associated Student Government President and Vice President for the 2021-2022 school year.
“Our commitment to representing our students and building together and empowering futures still stands, and that doesn’t matter who you voted for, whether you voted for us, or you supported our opposition,” Vice President Elect Edwards said. “At the end of the day, we’re all here at CMU and we really want to create the environment for all students to really excel in the classroom and outside and that doesn’t change.”
Running on the platform of “building together and empowering futures,” the pair ran unopposed after their opposition, Jaqui Cordova and Mario Bravo, dropped out of the race a few days before the election finished.
“Jacqui (Cordova) and Mario (Bravo) are excellent human beings, they’re excellent representatives, and their passion for representing students is amazing,” President Elect Shearrow said. “It’s definitely unfortunate that they pulled out of the race on Monday, but at the same time, I think the thing with Salina and I is that they pushed us to be better. Ultimately, I was very happy to run against them, and we share a lot of the same vision, and we went to be able to execute on that vision, because that’s what the students deserve.”
With the race concluding, Shearrow and Edwards are eager to start representing students.
“For me, the biggest thing is that I’m just ready to finally start representing students,” Shearrow said. “The reason that Salina and I got into this originally was for the students, and I think that what we saw during the campaign with all of their engagement and support.”
In addition to representing students, the team is eager to start on more of their campaign promises.
“We built our campaign on a lot of things that we really want to implement, in regards to what student needs are, like financial literacy, mental health, all those different things,” Edwards said. “We really want to push policies and programs that address food insecurity. We think every student should be able to have at least one meal everyday that you can get from the UC, and policies like that.”
CMU will be welcoming a new president next fall, and the duo will be working to help students along with the transition.
“We won’t necessarily get to get very many seats at the table in terms of where we’re at until the summer, which is when we can really start doing things that we were talking about in the campaign,” Shearrow said. “The biggest thing that we can do now is bring the students’ voice and represent them into the presidential transition.”
