By: Anon
Every spring, if you listen close enough, you can hear a few students in the cafeteria telling their peers why they should be elected. And I mean really listen close, because everyone is talking over them. No one seems to care that much but… should they? After all, if you have enough friends, you already know how many votes you’re going to get, right? To many students, Student Government just feels like a popularity contest.
But surely that doesn’t matter. Student Government does so much for us, like planning the homecoming theme, the prom theme, and… and what? Is the Student Government just a glorified party planning committee?
To join Student Government, you have to take the Student Government class, which counts as an elective credit. If you’re a freshman, you have to start with freshman leadership. Only once you’ve joined the class are you given the information on how to run for class leadership.
But what do they do in the class?
English teacher and Student Government leader Ian Simpson says, “Student
Government is in charge of many of the activities that go on in the school and also events… the senior class is in charge of… the senior gift, the senior quotes, all that.” He goes on to list the many things that Juniors and Sophomores do… and all of them involve planning events. Student Government isn’t a government.
It’s a club.
A student who wished to remain anonymous used to show up to StuGo meetings and, unfortunately, had some pretty negative things to say about it. “I used to show up for the Wednesday meetings… and, literally, the biggest clique of just girls ever who all they would do is plan for events… it would be all one group of opinion and [my opinion], and they would all have one thing and [I would] have a different thing… there was never a variety of opinions or compromise…” And they’re not the only one. After a quick survey, 21 out of 30 random
students said that they didn’t feel like Student Government accurately represented the student body.
New English teacher Cheyenne DeBusk used to teach in Alabama where StuGo, known as SGA, was heavily involved in student life. “In general… [Student Government] also would do petitions [in addition to party planning], they would sometimes send out surveys for student opinion on certain topics… They would have meetings once or twice a month where they would get together and discuss issues that might need to be brought to admin… They would be, like, the in between between admin and students.” She goes on to say that, in Alabama, SGA managed to make chromebooks more accessible to students in ISS. The student body complained about how, if you didn’t have a device in ISS, you had nothing to do. After taking it to the Student Government, who took it to admin, chromebook carts were placed near ISS classrooms for the students to use to do work.
A government represents the people, and a government fights for the people. So, if our student government is purely party planning, what makes it a government? Popularity contests and underrepresentation are the last thing our generation needs, and the last thing we should be delivering to the new generation entering high school.
To Student Government from many a frustrated student:
What are you doing?