Sacramento State’s Faculty Senate passed the student excuse absence policy with a majority vote on Thursday.

After weeks of amending the policy, students now have the right to request their professor’s reasonable accommodations for verified excused absences for exceptional circumstances.

Such circumstances include serious illnesses, university-based events and other serious or compelling reasons. Those students who feel such reasonable accommodations were not provided by their professor have the right to appeal their grade before a panel after completion of the course.

However, the policy did not get the final approval by the senate without one last amendment that was proposed by professor for the Department of Recreation, Parks & Tourism, Katherine Pinch.

“An employment-related conflict beyond their control,” said Pinch as she described her proposed amendment. “So I’m assuming that since we could actually allow them [students] to withdraw from the whole class, that it might be a good idea to just add [this] to that clause because that would be quite an acceptable verified reason.”

Professor for the Department of Recreation, Parks & Tourism Anthony Sheppard explained the amendment.

“It would be quite inconsistent for us to allow a student to drop after the late adds and drops and things for reasons like this, and then not let them have a single day out of class for a work related reason,” Sheppard said.

After the policy was approved new discussion topics arose like reconstructing the faculty office hour’s policy.

The last time the policy was modified was in 1985, which is the current policy today requiring faculty to offer three hours for office hours.

“There was a lot of concerns that were brought to us about the creation of alternative office hours and what does that actually means,” said sociology professor, Todd Migliaccio. “So we actually did start and had that conversation about how to define that as well as how to set it in policy.”

This time around policy committee members want to incorporate virtual office hours.

“We wanted to include the virtual office hours and what we decided to do was to allow for a variation within that,” Migliaccio said. “And while we had a lot of conversations of how we should define that, we finally decided normal rules should apply the departments can kind of figure this out because as we were discussing about it every department seemed to have a different practice, some had problems with it, others it was working great.”