GW officials plan to expand the Colonial Cabinet by six members and cut down the number of Colonial Inauguration sessions from five to four starting next summer, a senior administrator said this week.

Robert Chernak, senior vice president for Student and Academic Support Services, said if the plan is approved, there will be an increase of 100 students and 100 parents per session and CI sessions will finish before the Fourth of July holiday.

“The demands on faculty and staff involved in CI were becoming a burden,” Chernak said. “The end of CI sessions and the start of classes were butting up too close together.”

The additional number of students and parents attending each session will mean the Cabinet will also need to be bolstered to keep the ratio of cabinet members to students proportionate.

“With an increase in overall attendance at each session from 1,000 to 1,200 people about equally divided between students and parents, to keep the appropriate ratio of cabinet members to participants would require an approximate 20 percent increase in staffing,” Chernak said.

These proposed changes are part of a larger overhaul of CI programming, Chernak said. A brainstorming group will be formed in December to begin looking at more drastic changes for the summer of 2010.

Chernak said, “We’re doing fine-tuning for next summer, but we have more flexibility for 2010.”