Katie Stillwell, the Student Government Association’s chief of staff, announced her resignation at Tuesday night’s senate meeting.

“I want you all to know that I’ve always taken my position in SGA very seriously,” Stillwell said in her announcement. “I’ve always considered myself a student leader — student being first — and over the last year, I haven’t done so well in the classroom and I think that’s unfortunate.”

Stillwell said she needs to take the time to get her grades back to where they need to be and with her part-time job and the 10 hours a week required of her in SGA, she let her studies slide.

President Billy Stephens responded to Stillwell’s announcement by thanking her for her service as SGA’s chief of staff.

“On behalf of all the student government, Katie, thank you for all you’ve done,” Stephens said. “We appreciate it. You will be missed.”

Stephens also announced that he has found a replacement for Stillwell. Eric Smiley, a former chief of staff who served two years ago under the Kevin Smiley administration, will be back to serve as chief of staff for the remainder of the semester.

“I’m confident in my replacement,” Stillwell said.

Smiley will be up for senate approval next Tuesday.

After Stillwell’s announcement, the meeting continued with SGA passing two bills. Five other pieces of legislation received first reads and are scheduled to be voted on next week.

“I mean, I’m very impressed with the legislation that’s been put through so far so let’s just keep up the momentum,” Speaker of the Senate Kaylee Egerer said at the meeting.

The first bill passed was an organizational aid bill. The bill will allocate $2,400 total for the following organizations: Honors Abroad Alumni, Student Identity Outreach, Alpha Epsilon Delta, Western Kentucky Communication Organization for Graduate Students and Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji.)

All organizations will receive $500 except Honors Abroad Alumni, which will receive $400.

The second bill passed allocated funding to support and sponsor WKU Cares t-shirts. The bill will allocate $427 to purchase 50 WKU tournament t-shirts which will support WKU Cares — a campaign to support the Western Kentucky branch of the Red Cross — while acknowledging the basketball team’s recent success in the NCAA Tournament.

The shirts are $12 and the profits will go toward tornado relief efforts in both this region as well as other parts of Kentucky.

While the t-shirts are for a good cause, the design promotes WKU school spirit and success by recognizing the team’s recent achievement in the NCAA Tournament, according to the bill.

“Over spring break, we kind of missed, you know, helping with this, but a lot of our friends and family at WKU were also affected by the tornadoes and I kind of wanted to pair that with the recent success of WKU’s basketball season,” said Sen. Kelley Boothe, one of the authors of the bill.

The resolution to support the removal of the “External Computer Use and Ethics” section from the student handbook has been put on hold due to further discussion as far as the second read. A third party organization has gotten involved and they now have to further discuss the situation.

Other topics were the success of last week’s NCAA viewing parties, the Hall of Distinguished Seniors applications are now online and posters are currently being worked on for the spring election and the upcoming SGA sponsored baseball game.