When you start trying to find a reason for why Student Government did not plan to attend the Rally for Higher Education in Frankfort this year, you might be faced with a blizzard of reasons and excuses – or at least an icy path to try and follow.

But they are not excuses though. And it seems every school had a few. The rally, in which students lobby for legislators to keep from cutting higher education funding, was eventually canceled because too few schools could attend.

At first, it seems the recent ice storm was just an out for the UK SG, since schools such as Louisville and Murray State were not attending. But the rally is, as SG President Tyler Montell puts it, the one thing SG has really worked on.

“We don’t exist for the rally,” Montell said. “But it’s the thing we’ve worked on the whole time (with other school’s SG presidents).”

Montell sees not going to the rally as “disheartening,” because they have gone for years now and it provides a forum for students to let legislators know they care.

But that is only when students actually show up. You know, the other ones who are not a part of the Student Government Association.

Every year SG offers to take students to the rally, providing the transportation and a meal, according to Montell. And it seems that’s really a valiant effort, considering it gives so many students a chance to be a part of the lobbying process and gives them a voice, no matter how small it may actually be.

“As we planned the rally, I thought it was going to be a lot better than it’s ever been,” Montell said.

But SG can only do so much before the short hop and skip over to Frankfort isn’t worth the funds. This year, SG made signing up for the trip it as easy as getting a UK Alert – that is, really easy. Their Web site had a sign-up option, making the whole process the easiest it has ever been. And SG expected a greater turnout.

“To put things in context, Sunday of last year before the rally we had about 50 people signed up,” Montell said.

Fifty students may not be astounding, but it puts this year to shame.

“That was without the signup on the Web site, and we still had four (sign up this year), and those people were still in Student Government.” Montell said. “And we said it’s not worth the $1,250.”

Maybe not, at least at first glimpse.

The over $1,200 Montell is talking about is from the $600 for the charter bus – which could hold 55 people, but might have been a bit excessive for four; the $500 SG had promised to the organization who signed up the most people – which was SG; and the rest would be for food and other expenses.

So, in light of not going to the rally, Montell and Co. will be doing community service – picking up branches from the storm – for five hours in Lexington on Saturday. Specifics on what members of SG would participate were unclear with Montell on Tuesday. Chief of Staff, Ben Duncan, who did not return Kernel phone calls on Tuesday, was said to be planning the volunteer work.

The community service is a good effort by SG, but it seems like a ploy to distract from the fact that they had no one sign up for the Rally for Higher Ed. Why can’t SG do both?

All responsibility can’t be shoved off onto the ice storm – surely some people would have signed up before the Tuesday storm hit. Duncan was promoting the trip in person to the Kernel in mid-January. It seems that even if there had been no storm, SG would have only had a few students signed up for the trip, only 30 minutes away. So, why were there not more students already committed?

This seems to be a reoccurring theme for the 2008-09 SG staff. In January, the Kernel reported that of $60,000 available to student organizations in the fall, around $20,000 was left.

As of now, SG has $20,000 extra and a total of $51,000 left to be appropriated in the organization’s budget. So to play up that this is the “best use of student funds” is hardly an excuse. If four students – you know, the non-SG type – had signed up to go to the rally, then that would have been a good use of the $1,250, because it seems no one else is using it. But it was all just in-house.

The community has needed this community service every other day than the rally – it shouldn’t have been an excuse to officially call it off. But instead, SG waited until five days after the storm hit and then killed a significant annual trip to plan their community service – which they scheduled to do four days later.

That doesn’t sound urgent, like a “statewide disaster.”

So if it’s not funding, and it’s not a statewide emergency, what’s keeping SG from lobbying for higher education?

Maybe when the storm clears, we’ll be able to find that answer.