Graduate and professional students will decide between increasing funding for the WSU Children’s Center or maintaining it and allocating the money to other programs.

The Graduate and Professional Student Association senate will vote on the proposals at its Feb. 26 meeting.

The proposals were announced on Feb. 12. One proposal would increase GPSA’s funding for the Children’s Center from its current level of $60,000 to $75,000. The other proposal would send that $15,000 elsewhere.

GPSA President Shane Reynolds said if the senate favors the latter proposal, the money would go toward programs such as travel and registration grants, student organizations and social events.

Travel and registration grants supplement graduate and professional students who are traveling to present their research at conferences, Reynolds said. Presenting research is an important part of professional development for graduate and professional students, he said. Giving presentations to non-specialized audiences helps students learn how to translate the jargon in their studies to understandable information, Reynolds added.

“Not only is it a good opportunity to network and kind of show what you’ve done,” Reynolds said, “it’s a good opportunity to work on your communication skills.”

Funding could be allocated to student organizations, which could hold social events, he said. These events have become more expensive to host as the cost of rental space and food has increases.

“Having a little extra money to assist in those sorts of endeavors is, I think, a really positive thing,” Reynolds said.

Joshua Munroe, GPSA Vice President of Legislative Affairs, said one of the things he hoped would get more funding was software updates for GPSA’s study center.

“For the last few years we’ve been spending down a carry-forward by investing it in our study center at the bottom of the library,” Munroe said, “one of the things that that study center needs is software for people to actually do research.”

Adding a software would allow graduate and professional students to use the study center when they do not have offices of their own, or if they need a quiet space for doing data-heavy research, he said.

In regards to the Children’s Center, Munroe said GPSA needed to think about what has a lot of value to the students that are currently studying in WSU.

He said childcare is a massive one, particularly because a majority of the graduate and professional students that use the Children’s Center are international students.

“We want to be as intentional as possible when we’re looking at all these considerations,” Munroe said. “Sometimes it doesn’t come down to the ones and zeroes, it comes down to the actual human impact that our organization can have.”