SGA voted 17-15 to reject the UCA Dance Team’s request for funds.

Senators spent almost an hour in a heated debate on whether to fund the registration fee of $4,025 for the dance team, 15.9% of the dance team’s original request of $25,228 to fund its trip to nationals.

In its proposal, the dance team outlined the costs of going to nationals, at over $1,000 per team member.

While it receives a budget from UCA Athletics, it is not considered a team and receives limited funding, dance team coach Whitney Burr said.

“The average cost of being on the dance team this year is $3,578.78 per member. Remarkably, these individuals have already fundraised 51% of the total, leaving them with a remaining target of $1,802 [per student],” dance team member Jenna Mae Webb said at last week’s meeting.

After sitting on the request for a week, the SGA Finance Committee presented the senate with 2 courses of action; the first, and preferred option, was to not fund the team at all, and the second option was to fund only registration for the members which would be $4,025.

Some senators expressed issues with the request.

“Finance Committee kind of decided that we were leaning towards not funding it. For one, we’ve never done anything like this, it could set a precedent for other athletic departments to come and possibly request money,” Sen. Lily Moritz said.

Other members of the senate disagreed, citing that the dance team represents the entire student body, and deserves SGA’s support.

“I think they really do represent us very well as an organization, and because they compete they put our name out there. We are UCA; we are united. That is a very important thing that all of our sports teams do,” Sen. Abby Poole said.

While the UCA Dance Team receives a small travel budget, it was used to replace uniforms that have been in use since 2014, Vice President of Finance Phoenix Vu said.

“As far as the uniforms, that’s an expense that they also should have been preparing for in the decade that they had the old uniforms,” Vice President of Operations Brad Lewis said.

Sen. Ryan Webb said the decision to not provide funding was “hypocritical.”

“I’m just disappointed that we didn’t fund the dance team. I think it’s hypocritical to fund the fraternities and sororities to go to other states for a leadership conference. I voted against it [providing funding to the fraternity] because I thought it was the right thing to do.

“I thought it could have been better funded by the sororities or fraternities, just like most of these people decided not to fund the dance team because they thought that they could be better funded by the athletics department, even though they aren’t really a sport. So I was very disappointed with today’s decision. I thought it was superlatively hypocritical to be exact,” he said.