The Graduate and Professional Student Senate will discuss the graduate/professional allocations policies and a tuition waiver for all graduate students Monday.

Five bills will be introduced at Monday’s Graduate and Professional Student Senate monthly meeting.

These bills will address the adoption of the 2003—2004 new standing rules, graduate/professional allocations policies and regulations, the March 2004 budget timeline change, revision to the budget by-laws and the graduate student proposal for tuition waiver.

The hope for the graduate/professional allocations policies and regulations bill is to change the current allocation procedure to better meet the needs of graduate student organizations.

“The current allocation procedure fits the needs of the broad undergraduate programs, but graduate organizations are so defined that it makes it hard to distribute money,” said Kristen Meyer, Graduate and Professional Student Senate treasurer.

Meyer, graduate in mathematics, said the purpose of the bill is to simplify the allocations procedure for graduate student organizations.

“This way more money will go to support graduate education,” Meyer said. “Simplifying the procedure will allow more graduate students to benefit from the allocations.”

One of the issues the group has been working on is getting support for a full tuition waiver for all graduate students.

Tuition for graduate students with nine or more credits is $2,519 for residents and $7,107 for non-residents.

Lakshminaras Krishnaswamy, Graduate and Professional Student Senate university relations chairman, said many board members have worked with John Mayfield, associate dean of the graduate college, and others on the tuition waiver.

Dee Egdorf, president of Graduate and Professional Student Senate, said she wants to make sure graduate students’ perspectives are heard by the Board of Regents.