Congratulations, Student Association senators. You won an election, earned the votes of your peers and became GW’s top student advocates. What do you do next? Find an issue on campus and write a bill, of course.

But some student representatives need to take a step back before making something out of nothing. SA Sen. Marshall Cohen, CCAS-U, put forth a bill last week which encourages the University to buy more blue light phones and improve the visibility of ones already active. It received wide support among the other senators.

The problem? Security officials have said that the blue lights are already functional and almost never used. And blue lights are the butt of jokes on campus, generally viewed as unnecessary. There is no real reason to pursue something that doesn’t need fixing.

If I felt unsafe on Foggy Bottom’s streets, I’d likely use my cell phone to call for help, not a blue light. And I’m not alone in that respect. University Police Department Chief Kevin Hay told The Hatchet last week that the last time he remembered a crime reported through the blue light system was two years ago.

To be fair, it’s a good idea to have blue lights on campus. But when it comes down to it, they are nothing more than a talking point tour guides use to reassure parents their child will be safe at GW. They’re a great safety net, but that’s really all they are.

Cohen told me in an email that he “looked at the different standards of blue lights on college campuses and comparisons to other college campuses” as a way of evaluating GW’s system.

I was curious, so I did a little research myself. GW has 36 blue lights for 43 acres of campus space, which leads to a blue light every 1.19 acres. But Boston University, another very urban campus, has about 100 emergency phones that serve 133 acres of campus, according to their security website. This means that there is a phone approximately every 1.4 acres.

So from a coverage standpoint, GW has done pretty well for itself.

Students are hardly using the blue lights, anyway. Hay said that the use of blue lights has fallen 26 percent since last year – and that the majority of uses were pranks. That sounds more like a liability to UPD than a necessary security precaution for students.

Now, Cohen said that part of the issue is that some blue light phones “do not shine a constant blue light or have out of order signs on them.” And he’s right. That could certainly lead to confusion.

But an issue like that could be resolved over a simple conversation with UPD. It’s not a vital issue for which there should be an SA resolution. Putting efforts toward it simply pads the resumes of student leaders while doing little to actually make a difference on campus.

There are better ways for our student leaders to spend their time.

The SA can count plenty of lobbying successes lately, but only when they focus on issues – big or small – that really matter to students, like moving health centers to campus, eliminating the graduation fee, getting some food trucks on GWorld and scaling down judicial sanctions.

And while smaller efforts are also essential, leaders should eschew ones that are inconsequential – like fixing things that aren’t even used.

The writer, a sophomore majoring in English, is a Hatchet columnist.