The Student Services Finance Committee approved the Campus Women's Center's and Rape Crisis Center's requests for student segregated-fee funding Thursday at the latest in a series of meetings allocating student funding to University of Wisconsin student organizations.

After hearing proposals from the two organizations last week, the committee found the two organizations qualified to receive student segregated-fee funding. Both the Campus Women's Center and Rape Crisis Center were unanimously approved for funding.

While the two organizations are important to students, the Rape Crisis Center is essential on campus because there is no alternative to its rape-crisis hotline, SSFC representative Barbara Kiernoziak said.

In addition, the committee heard proposals from the Child Care Tuition Assistance Program, Sex Out Loud and the Multicultural Student Coalition.

SSFC will decide on those organizations' eligibility at its next meeting.

One MCSC representative voiced his opinion in support of the organization in advance.

"If it weren't for the MCSC, I wouldn't be here," MCSC representative Kevin Dopwell said. "They're like family."

While both the Campus Women's Center and the Rape Crisis Center were approved for funding, the engineering organization Polygon was denied.

Some committee representatives said the services provided by Polygon, such as advising, career fairs and leadership opportunities, were services already offered by other organizations.

SSFC representative Zach Frey said Polygon was not eligible to receive funding because the organization is exclusively geared toward engineering students.

"Engineering students are not the only ones who would fund it, so why should they be the only ones to benefit?" Frey asked.

There were no representatives from Polygon at the meeting to speak in its defense.

During an open session before the hearings, the Legal Information Center representatives pled their case to have their eligibility reconsidered after being denied funding for missing the committee's application deadline.

LIC representative Lauren Wolf attempted to explain to the council that three of the four leaders failed to receive notification of the application by the committee's deadline.

After LIC representatives realized they had missed the deadline, Wolf said they worked diligently to turn in their application as soon as possible.

"We realize that this problem is largely a result of our organization's high turnover rate, but we will take steps to account for that," she said. "We just hope they don't take personal offense because of our late application, and take into account our extenuating circumstances."

A motion to reconsider LIC eligibility again ignited debate, but some SSFC representatives felt the issue did not merit revisiting.

Kiernoziak said she felt spending more time discussing an issue that was not on the agenda was not fair to other organizations waiting to make their presentations to the committee.

LIC eligibility was later tabled for discussion at the next meeting.