Briefs

Student trustee elections, forum: One student and one employee (balloting for employees will begin March 15) will be elected this month to be members of the Cornell Board of Trustees. The student trustee election will start March 8 at 8 a.m. and last until March 10 at 8 a.m. This year is significant in that there are two graduate students in the race; the last graduate student trustee was in 1993-95.

Student trustee voting is online and votes will be tabulated using the Hare system. That system asks voters to rank candidates in order of preference and requires the winner to have a majority, not a plurality, of votes. After the first round of voting, if no candidate has a majority of the votes cast, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and his or her second-place votes are assigned to the remaining candidates. Voting rounds are repeated until one candidate has a majority of the votes cast.

Here are the student trustee candidates:

Anup Bogineni '06, Engineering; Peter S. Cohl '05, Arts and Sciences, and Architecture, Art and Planning, and MRP '06; Justin Giles '06, Arts and Sciences; Josh Katcher '06, Arts and Sciences; Brooke McDowell '06, Arts and Sciences; Doug Mitarotonda '02, M.Eng. '03, Ph.D. economics '08; Robert Rose, MBA '05/MPS real estate '06.

There will be a Student Trustee Candidates Forum today, March 4, in the International Lounge of Willard Straight Hall, 6:45-8 p.m. For election information, including statements from the candidates, see: http://trustee.assembly.cornell.edu/.

School district support: The All of Us public-education support campaign has made it easier for members of the Cornell community to support the Ithaca public schools directly. The campaign is a grassroots movement to get the Ithaca community more involved in the public schools by increasing volunteer involvement and direct donations to school projects. The campaign's Web site -- http://www.freebayforus.org/ -- offers an online teachers' "wish list." Any department that is moving or simply cleaning house can now go online and post supplies they can offer to the schools and also check out the list of items requested by Ithaca City School District teachers. For the campaign, "It Just Takes All of Us to Educate Our Kids," first grade teacher Randi Beckman worked with Web designer Bill Carini to create the user-friendly Web site-exchange program for the Ithaca public schools. For more information, visit http://www.allofus.cc/ or call All of Us resource coordinator Ellen Morris-Knower at 592-222.