Siona Jain Charts Tenure for 2021-2022 Tenure

2021-2022 Student Council President Siona Jain gave an interview with News Editor Hansi Zhu on her reflections from the election cycle, vision for the next year and hopes for the new board.

First of all, what are your opinions on the use of social media for expressing support for candidates in this year's election process?

I think that in the past, social media has been a very easy way to spread knowledge about your campaign and just encourage support, and get your face out there for people to see. I think because this election was purely on social media [and] it wasn't in person, you weren’t going up to everybody, asking for their signature and explaining your campaign. There were a lot of opportunities to throw words around that you might not have the courage to do in-person, purely because it's a lot harder to say something to someone’s  face. So I know that both Bona and I had a really tough time over the past two weeks, almost three weeks.

We were dealing with people in our DMs,our comments, and over  every social media platform. And I know that we both had to take time and delete the app [Instagram], turn off our accounts, or  put our phone away for entire nights. I think social media was necessary to use because of our remote students, but I would like to see Exeter students just become more compassionate and kinder over social media. And I know this goes for both Bona and myself. We also need to hold ourselves to that and yeah, I think it really hit a low over the weekend when we saw people publicly calling us out saying that we didn't do the work that we claimed that we did, or attacking our characters or comparing us to politicians as high school students in a high school government election.

And that definitely felt like a lot. And I know that Bona and I called each other on Sunday night and we were both just crying, like: this has gone too far. I can't think about anything. I can't do my schoolwork. I'm having trouble opening my phone. Because I know that every time I do, I'm going to open it up to 16 messages saying like: ‘you know, you shouldn't have done this, or you shouldn't have done that, or you were wrong for this, or you entirely didn't fulfill this promise during a COVID year.’ And so we talked for like two hours and we were just saying, you know, what if we push a Co-Presidential ticket, and unfortunately we got shot down by the advisers on a Constitutional basis. It was unconstitutional, but I think that it says something about how polarizing social media this year alone, that we, the candidates, came together to really try and come up with a solution.

But essentially I just think that social media has its good moments and its bad moments and its bad moments were incredibly apparent this time around.

How did it make you feel just to see this all happen over social media?

I think I definitely felt just emotionally exhausted. Like, this thing has taken three weeks. The first week was putting in our candidate statement and creating a poster. I was up late at night trying to make my poster look somewhat aesthetically nice, make sure I had all the ideas I wanted to down. And I was working with my mom—she's amazing, and she helped me design all my posters. That whole week was a lot of exhaustion just in terms of getting my things together and creating this video, doing all that work. And then the second week was just pure exhaustion as well. I also wanted Bona to make it to the primaries because I felt that we would both do really great as leaders. 

So we were just working hard trying to get posts out every single day. And then obviously this week, it got to be a little too much. I think every single day I had trouble. As soon as there was a call-out, I had trouble just getting out of my bed to get my homework started. Like I know on Sunday, specifically, both Bona and I said that we didn't want to leave our rooms because we felt as though a lot of people on campus hated us, which is a really damaging feeling to have as a high school student. We're going to be here for another year, and we obviously didn't want to feel that way. So I was in my bed in my room for most of the day, just flipping through Instagram.

These past two were definitely my lowest points mentally at Exeter. I really just hope we don't see this again and I'm going to definitely make it a priority for next election season to potentially push for a Co-President ticket to perhaps make this less polarizing and include more diverse perspectives and I’ll also encourage more guidelines for social media, because the way we were feeling as though everyone hates us meant we just didn't want to leave our rooms, leave our beds or get started on our homework. That's not something any candidate should have to go through purely to run for a Student Council position because they just want to do something better for the school. They shouldn't have to feel that way

I'm really sorry that you had to feel that way, but I really hope you know that there are so many people on campus that do support you and you can tell too, because there was so much support out there for both candidates. Well, thank you for sharing. Next, talk to me about how you plan to use the $30,000 thousand budget.

I have several ideas. The first is obviously OMA (Office of Multicultural Affairs) stipends. That's something I've been talking with OMA leaders all year about, in informal settings and formal settings, and with Principal Rawson. I think ALES (the Afro-Latinx Exonian Society) came out with their letter for compensation many years ago, and the administration just has not taken it upon themselves. I wish I did more, but I advocated for compensation too; , but they still are against it, or are, at the very least hesitant about it. And so I wonder how Student Council can use our budget for something good within this school. So I do plan on first conversing with OMA leaders and discussing, do they want compensation from us? And how much would be good for the OMA clubs? 

I plan on getting it to the entirety of the OMA clubs, so just getting it to all of AV (Asian Voices), ALES, YBS (Young Brothers Society), Transitions, whatever it is, and they can decide how they disperse it, whether be to their leaders, to their events. That's not something for me to decide. That's not something for Student Council to decide. That's not our place. And so I hope to hold those conversations over the next couple of weeks and use a portion of the budget for that. 

I don't have a specific allotment plan because I don't want to limit the amount of money that we spend on something purely because I did not allot it out.another idea I have is obviously for recreational student life, because, as we know, this year has been one of the most taxing years for the Exeter community, and I know that a lot of preps, particularly, didn’t have the chance to experience things that we got to experience like WinFo (Winter Formal), Back in Black. And there's no way to really bring them back in a COVID safe manner, so I'm hoping to, if anything, better student lives with the use of either material goods, such as kayaks for the river, or even just planning out different events. That's gonna be a portion of the budget. 

Other portions will go to student initiatives. I know that we just passed a Marketplace Craigslist that was organized by four students on campus, Nick, Alexander, Kevin, and Charlie. So at the end of the year, when you have things you wanna throw away from your dorm, rather than just contributing to the amount of waste that we have on campus, you can then sell it to your friends.

I'm also planning on using a portion to work on ideas Bona proposed, with obviously her pioneering and leading if she’s interested. I know that I love and support of the her anti-oppressive proposals, but I would love to work with her and support her in her goal because I know that she did want to bring some anti-racist organizations, actual resources, to campus. As you know, we can't invest in other organizations—the school shut us down all summer because of that. We tried many times, but I would love to see how much we can actually join in in our efforts, because I do think that she has amazing ideas in terms of bringing—I believe she said this—resource bookshop—I'm forgetting the exact term with it—and bringing that to campus. So I'd love to see that happen. 

I just essentially want to use that money to better Exeter student life, [and] make sure the students who are putting in the mental and emotional labor on a daily basis on this campus, and are forced to do that because of the administration that's very ineffective, are having better compensation for that. I want to make sure that students in general have a more inclusive community, and I believe that money can be used for that. So I essentially want to stop hoarding. It's my goal.

And I know that this last year has been a crazy one in the sense that we weren't allowed to start spending until about November when we had a full Council and that's when we could spend more than $200. Before that, we could only spend $200 max, which as, you know, $200 doesn't go a long way.

Before October, from March when we were elected until October, we couldn't spend anything because we were just not allowed to. Executive Board doesn't have a lot of power in that sense. From October is when we had our Budget Committee heads finally come into their spot and then they could decide if they wanted to spend. I also don't think there was enough publicity on that, which I also plan to change. And so... from December 2nd or something like that to now, we've been trying to get the word out more about Budget, and so we've passed a couple of proposals here and there. 

Essentially, this year has been a lot of delay and I can't deny that we'd been extremely ineffective over Spring because we weren't allowed to meet. So we lost an entire term. We lost another term though, just like elections, as I'm sure you remember, like prep and lower rep elections, all the Committee Head applications, everything that happened over fall term. So we really had maybe a month, two months and a half, where we really had control over Budget to do something with it and we were off campus, So I don't know, I'm excited to see what's coming up Spring Term. I mean, a lot of the budget is currently allocated to committees, and only a portion of it has been spent on student initiatives.

We're gonna try and publicize that more, but in terms of committees we’re excited to see more dorm funds are allocated, more money for things like—Rec. Committee thought of this event: a car smash where you get a used car. And literally just like, as a venting mechanism with Mental Health Committee, where they're probably going to have students smash a used car. And then things like Bonfire for E/A, sometime in spring term or sometime over the next couple of weeks. I'm excited to see what they'll do with it. And I'm excited to keep working on making sure that budget is a little bit more transparent because I know that there's a lot of issues with that.

Do you have a plan set in place on how you're going to get the budget more accessible to everyone?

Yeah. So first I'm going to, at a start of every term, write a very full and clear email to every single club head detailing the exact amount of the budget and how much has been used, what it's been used for, and explaining, “This is the process, fill in the form because it's on our Canvas.” 

It's accessible to everyone, but I know that people don't check—for example, like nobody's going to go to the Student Council Canvas and look at Files and look at the proposal. So I'm going to actually put it in that email. I’m going to also create a link to it in our PEA StuCo Instagram. And then every time a bunch of proposals are passed, every time money is spent, every time that's allocated, I'm going to require that class reps and our Student Council Instagram posts about it.

This is something that's entirely on me and entirely on the Executive Board that we didn't work on with PR committee this year. So I don't want the blame to be on them.we didn't ever explicitly tell them to post about the budget being spent or allocated to committees. That's something that I feel the student body should have known. The full Council knew, but nobody else did. I also want to work with grade reps, to make this a requirement for them to post about that. And I think that should hopefully make this a little bit more accessible, for more people to know about this. And I think that's really the biggest deal—getting publicity out. 

I think that in terms of accessibility, we haven't turned down a proposal in a really long time. And the only reason why things might get turned down is because Council doesn't vote in favor and that's something we're also changing right now. Charlie [Holtz] just proposed a new amendment where Budget Committee can spend 5% of the current budget and that's their threshold without a Council vote. And what that means is they don't have to bring it to the full 100% Council to vote on your proposal for things like uniforms or club food or whatever. Only they can decide and they can immediately just say yes or no. And that just streamlines the process, you know, like in the past uniforms for POMs where that was taken away because people didn't agree on spending some $300 on POMs uniforms. That's such a small thing for a club that could really help out with just extra school spirit. And so with Charlie's amendment, we're going to essentially increase the amount of money that they can spend without a full Council vote. That should hopefully streamline the process a little bit more.

That's great to hear. What do you plan to do for the anti-racism issues within the community? 

One of the things that we've been doing is working with JEDI. We have an amendment in the constitution where we requiring an anti-racist workshop or training with council every single term. What we plan on doing with that is to have our class reps do class community events that are a lot more focused on anti-oppressive work. Perhaps doing one of those “walk the line” events like Exonian Encounters does, and making sure that we create more inclusive class environments. I think that's where Student Council really has its role. I'm doing that within dorm reps as well. During last night’s meeting, we had an entire anti-racist train session. We split up every group by committee heads, dorm reps and class reps. Tina and Janessa, amazing people that they are, wrote out this entire training session with Dr. Bramlett’s help. 

We all facilitated a group, though last minute I had to take a step back due to election stress, and essentially just said, okay, this is an issue. We provided them with a scenario. What's the root cause of this? How can we help this? What's an event we can do to better this inclusivity and this environment on campus? So that's part of the work that we're doing. I think another thing is in terms of diversifying the curriculum and continued appointment. Those are two things that I've been working on this year. As for diversifying the curriculum, we did get shot down since Exeter really prides itself on its teachers being able to teach whatever they want, while I think there's some beauty in that, I also think that teaching whatever you want shouldn't mean that you have full liberty to teach only texts from white male authors, for example. I'm going to work with, policy, JEDI, and whoever else wants to work on this project to change that for next year.

For continued appointment, there's already a committee setup after working with Dean Wolff, who has set up a committee to change our tenure system, which basically protects a lot of our old white racist faculty and encourages a lot of our new faculty of color to leave this campus. It's a whole review process. I’d like to make the knowledge about this work more public, and I hope to open up the conversation with more students.

Another idea is just in terms of CCC. We've already started restorative justice training sessions this year, but I know that Dean Breen is still doing a lot of court work in terms of looking at past issues of racial bias and of this year, just looking at restorative justice in terms of COVID or whatever infractions that it is. I’d love to work more with them.

I know that Seth and Senai have been really in the thick of it because they were both on the executive board and on CCC. This is definitely an idea that was also brought up by Bona and both of us ran on similar ideas in terms of CCC work, so I’d love to see how I can work with her on that.

For anti-racist work in general, bringing students into rooms is the biggest thing that I want to focus on. I don't want to create an open forum and Student Council and basically say, you can come to us. I don't want to do that. I want to publicize, open up conversations, and reduce the amount of student initiative where students have to start all the conversations and council later joins in. That shouldn’t be the order. I hope to lower the work students have to do to simply saying yes I want to be a part of this conversation - a conversation Council has already started without being prompted . I also hope to make StuCo as available as possible to OMA without forcing them to attend more meetings. One way to do this is by sending an OMA newsletter to all members and leaders with conversations we intend to center our term around. In that newsletter, we can say, if your club has met to talk about this topic—for example, affinity housing—we’d love to hear your perspective. This newsletter will also detail when we’re having meetings with Principal Rawson for OMA clubs to join and will let OMA clubs know how we can support them—through publicity, funding etc. It's a difficult balance though—making sure we reduce student initiative but also making sure we don’t reach out to the same people every time about anything DEI related. I don’t have a perfect system, and I’d welcome any additional suggestions. Supporting other student groups is not something we've done in the past.. We've been trying to change that this year, but I don't think we've done enough. I really don't think so. I would love to expand past even just ALES and AV and focus on also smaller OMA clubs, for example, and if they want, bring them into rooms where they might not be able to easily get into such as with Principal Rawson and other trustees purely because we are an organization on campus that has the privilege of being heard.

Besides just policy work, besides the budget work, a lot of this has to do with us reaching out to student leaders, student groups and proctors, and making sure that they have the chance to be in this room instead of us. Why are we always the ones that they first turn to about the schedule, or that they first turn to about anti-racist workshops? Student Council has not been doing this work. We have not. The schedule is something that affects so many students and you need people with diverse backgrounds to really inform, especially during a quarantine time, how that schedule should look like. That's something I've been trying to do this year—literally move us more from the picture and bring in other groups with the privilege that we hold. 

I wanted to talk a little bit about bringing OMA leaders into conversations. You mentioned in one of your candidate platforms about removing the burden of representation from OMA leaders, but we were wondering, how will you alleviate the burden of representation by essentially creating more meetings that OMA leaders have to attend to, and to speak to authority figures on campus? Some students have raised a little bit of confusion about that.

I think the burden of representation pertains to always having them come to us and kind of saying, ‘reach out to us,’ or Principal Rawson saying, ‘you should always reach out to me.’ That in itself is an open method of communication, but it doesn't foster a relationship and it places the burden on the OMA club leaders to always have to reach out for support. I don't want to have to impose upon the work that they're doing and impose upon the events that they're doing in a sense that I'm not going to always come up to them and take it over. 

I want to publicize a lot of the work that they're doing. There's definitely different clubs holding different events, shows, and fundraisers consistently. Their work can be easily publicized by the Student Council Instagram. So I'm hoping for more support in terms of what Student Council can do for these different clubs and making sure that we support them.

Instead of turning to just OMA leaders, I’d love to collaborate with broader club members, and minority students not part of these affinity groups. That means that we don't just turn to the leaders themselves, we turn to the clubs to create open spaces..

Affinity housing is something that we’ve had on the table for this year that we’ve been trying to talk to Principal Rawson about. The Student Council has not been having those conversations. We are not a group that is as c as invested in it as other groups have been in the past. I think that making sure that we ask for opinions is important.

I recognize that a lot this sounds like creating a burden of representation by bringing OMA leaders and members into those conversations. What I'm trying to emphasize is that we want to make it a choice, and we want to create an open space for it to be possible if they want it. We are having a conversation with Principal Rawson on some event in the country, and we publicize it on our Instagram or in a term or monthly newsletter. We want to say, ‘do you want to be part of this? Do you want to share more of your ideas on this project?’ Hopefully what this will do is create an open space for possibility, because right now it's not possible for a lot of students who are part of OMA clubs, OMA leaders, or students in general, who are concerned about these issues to really get into those spaces with the deans, with Principal and with the trustees. This should hopefully reduce student initiative, so you shouldn’t have to prompt or organize those conversations. At the same time, it will reduce the burden of representation because we won’t reach out to specific people, and it’ll create conversations with more diverse perspectives.  Comparatively, the Student Council Executive Board is reached out to on a weekly basis.

While I don't want to force anyone to get into the spaces, and that's something I'm really much trying to stay away from, I want to create open possibilities for people to join those spaces. I don’t want to make Executive Board meetings closed, because that's been the case in the past: it’s that a lot of these meetings are very closed, with just the executive board, the deans and Principal Rawson. I think by opening those spaces up, you allow students a chance to take on this work if they want to, but you don't force them to. You simply inform them that you're doing this work, and that you're trying to create this conversation and that should hopefully alleviate the burden of representation, but also do what I've been trying to do all year—to create more open spaces for collaboration. 

I see. You mentioned opening up the conversation to more people, but how are you going to be able to reach out to those people? Especially if there are people in minority groups who aren't part of the affinity groups or just OMA groups specifically, how will you ensure that those voices are also heard if they need to be?

A lot of it is just publicity about these conversations. Most people didn't know that we were meeting with Principal Rawson to discuss continued appointments, or most people didn't know that we were meeting with Dr. Bramlett to discuss diversifying curriculum or anti-racist workshops. I recognize that AV currently is mainly students from Amen and the Exeter Inn, and I know that a lot of students have already expressed this opinion. It's damaging to know that not everyone finds a space within Asian Voices, for example. I was speaking clearly on Asian Voices because that’s the club I’m active in. Acknowledging that, I think one of the biggest ways that we can make sure that there are other students in the conversation, students who are part of minority groups, is purely by publicizing that we are having these conversations surrounding Asian American, Pacific Islander hate crimes, for example.

If anyone wants to join, they can always just slide up on an Instagram story, or DM me, or say whatever. This should help bring in students not part of those affinity groups. Additionally, I will include the topics of these conversations in a start of term newsletter to OMA clubs and members, which will also allow those active members to be part of conversations without us specifically contacting folks, placing that burden on them. We can’t just continually email the most active or most vocal people on campus. That's what happens in a lot of these clubs, right? 

Even with The Exonian, you always have the same kind of groups of people reached out to, I mean like there’s this OMA group chat. And we all had the same interview sent to us at the same exact time. And it's known that there's a core group of people that's really involved in this work. And I recognize that. And I think that's an issue for all of our clubs and it's something that we need to change.

So I think if we can purely publicize that there's a conversation about this happening, hopefully we can reach out to more people. I didn't mean to bring up that point about The Exonian as a jab at the paper, but this is something that we've struggled with as an Exeter campus and where we reach out to the same exact people every time, and that's not diverse in perspective. Even though it might look diverse on the page, it’s not a diverse perspective. My biggest thing is really just publicizing these conversations and making them open to more groups of people.

I know you talked about opening the scope of people up and making yourself available for people to come up to you if they also want to join. I'm wondering if there's still some level of initiative involved in that, in the same way that it is with—on obviously a larger scale—OMA clubs currently. How would you navigate that?

No. Yeah. And you're totally right. There is a level of initiative all the time and I don't think that's something I can entirely take away without then placing a burden of representation on specific students. And I acknowledge that. I don't think that I can entirely say, I will reach out to all OMA clubs and not have a level of burden of representation involved in that, because if you're reaching out to specific people, then you're kind of encouraging them to always be part of the conversations. What I'm trying to do is instead reduce the level of initiative students have to put in to start or organize conversations. I think that's the least amount of initiative I can create, just by purely making a way for you to sign up, to be part of the conversation. Right now the case is that students have to reach out to start the conversation and that’s damaging, and that's ridiculous that you have to reach out to me or to Principal Rawson to start a conversation on his delay in a letter, for example, and that has happened multiple times this year. I know that Daniel has reached out, Asian Voices has reached out, students individually have reached out, and that’s ridiculous.

Yeah. It's a difficult terrain to navigate, but I'm really glad that you're thinking about this work and I'm really also glad that you heavily incorporated it into your platform. Next question: financial compensation for OMA leaders. Could you talk about your stance?

It's needed and long overdue. I don't really know what more to add, but it's something that has been brought up to the administration consistently, and by s affinity groups that shouldn't have to bring that up. These affinity groups should be places for celebration and for simply a space for community. And unfortunately, because of the way that the administration has worked, a lot of these groups and affinity leaders end up having to take on intense emotional labor by doing policy work or by just doing counseling work. This concern has been brought up consistently. They've done so much of this work in the past and they deserve to be compensated for it, and the administration has simply not listened to that. 

Student council has not listened to that, or it’s never been brought up to us specifically, but it's not something we've ever taken initiative on. I recognize that this is a fault on our part. I genuinely truly support it. I think it's long overdue and incredibly necessary. And if the administration won't do it, I'm hoping that we can. 

How will you go about bringing forward financial compensation for OMA leaders? 

Right now I’m focusing specifically on OMA clubs because they've taken on a lot of this policy work. While there's so many other students on campus who really deserve compensation for this work, like proctors of minority groups for example, I'm not entirely sure how to navigate that with a $30,000 budget, which, while might seem large, can't compensate all the students who really truly need to be compensated.

The first step, which I think is a very small first step, is to compensate and provide stipends to OMA clubs. What that means is they can use that money for the leaders, for their events, and whatever they like. You can think of it more so as club funding. Right now, the pool of money for OMA clubs mainly comes from OMA, and I'm not entirely sure about how they’re allowed to spend that money. I hope that this club stipend can give them a little bit more liberty to spend that money on, whether it be in leaders by providing some compensation for the work that they've done, whether it be on OMA club members for something that they've done in terms of organizing events. They can decide. 

Essentially, what I hope to do is hold conversations, formally, between student council, budget, executive board and OMA club leaders. First things first, I would ask, do you want to have a conversation with us? Do you want this to happen at all? If you don't, that's totally fine. Then I’d say, “How much would you like?” I really don't think we can get close to what truly is adequate because they deserve so much. But I’d ask, what can we provide that might help support some of the events that you're doing, or support you in this work this year? I think this is one really major way we can support them, besides just publicizing their events, without infringing upon the work that they're already doing.

Thank you. So you also mentioned in your campaign that you drafted four different Vs policies. How's that going? What happened, or is happening, with those?

The fourth policy is currently being drafted right now, and I’ve planned it all out.The first three were written out and drafted. There's one that is an honor code policy, which is essentially if you let anyone into your room during the day, your door must be open. We could maybe have a sign-in sheet at the front, or work with campus safety to develop a keycard system. That one was immediately turned down by a lot of the faculty. We met with Mr. Myers, Mr. Chisholm, Mr. Caldwell, Dean Cahalane and more. They told us that it places too much liability on teachers. Especially if there's a sign up sheet, they know about the students entering, and they know about which students are in the dorm. But when no faculty is in the dorm, there’s no supervision. That one was shut down. 

Another policy was a dorm based one. I didn't like this proposal, and it was meant to be non-heteronormative on paper, saying that it didn't focus on gender, but it was based on what dorm you were affiliated with. We, actually both groups, faculty and students, decided to drop that one because it felt so much too heteronormative to say that, for example, if you're in Soule hall, then it's more acceptable for you to be with a kid in Abbott Hall, versus if you were an Amen hall and being with a person in Abbott. Even if it doesn't specifically reference gender, it does feel very heteronormative. So both faculty and the executive board decided to drop that one completely.

Our third one was grade based and it's something that follows Andover’s policy. As you get older, you have more privileges and at Andover, you can close your door in your second half of your senior year. So we were trying to implement that with longer hours by working with campus safety officers, and this is something that faculty were interested in. The faculty knew that this current Vs policy is kind of a joke, not because of non-heteronormative chances, but because students, by having so many restrictions, are just having more illegal Vs. Faculty knows that, and I think it's naive to assume that they don't. They know that the current policies are creating an environment for more illegal visitations, which is unsafe because now you have to choose between repercussions of illegal visitations versus repercussions of potentially being in an unsafe situation. So this is something we’re trying to change. Essentially what they said is that they are actually really interested in this idea of increased privileges as you go forward in your Exeter career, which comes with more maturity and age of consent. We're working with the legal team and having conversations with the Executive Board, and soon council to make it a little bit more concrete and set specific hours. I will then use a constitutional referendum to bring it to a full student body vote. 

We wrote off these proposals in the form of the E-Book to make it as easy as possible to follow. All three of the policies took away the inter-dorm ban on relationships because that's inherently homophobic. We just finished up with our third faculty meeting over the winter term, and we're now in the process of communicating with the legal team, which is with Ms. Holly Barcroft.

I'm really glad to hear that. Do you think you'll apply lessons from your last year as Co-Secretary to your tenure as President this year? Did you have any major lessons?

A lot of this year has been made up of a lot of learning on my part about anti-oppressive work. I know that so much of that has led to different opinions on representation. I started out running as a co-secretary on an idea of club reps and that creates a lot more burden of representation. I did not really fully comprehend this as a lower, and after learning and being in these conversations, I understand more about why that's damaging. That's why I didn't pursue it. A lot of this year, I’ve been learning about, what is the most effective way to bring students into conversations without forcing them to be there? How can we use counsel to be more empathetic to students because this year has been a quarantine and as you know, counsel hasn’t been able to accomplish a lot this year and we're trying to navigate mental health stress and things like that. We're not hounding people to do the work that they were supposed to be doing.

For the next year, I'm learning from that and seeing how to create more effective counsel based off of that. I'm also learning how to navigate a lot of the constitutional issues. There are a lot of random problems in the constitution, and that’s something I want to work on. Our new Executive Board is already discussing the new proposed Constitution from Tucker Gibbs—the good things about it, and the issues with it. So we're trying to bring that into conversation with the student council in spring term because we don't have any more meetings for the rest of winter. 

One of the biggest things besides learning about students and bringing student voices in, besides learning about running an effective counsel during a COVID year, is just how to navigate the system that Student Council has that limits a lot of its work. 

Do you anticipate discussing within the Council the new Constitution published in The Exonian by Tucker Gibbs, Phil Horrigan and Charlie Preston?

Definitely. We've already discussed bringing this to Council, and it's something we're already planning that’s in the works with the 2020-21 Executive Board the JEDI director is something I'm personally in favor of … We're just talking about what things are great, what things should we maybe amend to this Constitution that Tucker and Phil and Charlie have proposed. That's all happening right now. It's going to come to Council probably in the first or second meeting when we come back in spring term because we're still navigating a meeting with Principal Rawson and all of council. We’re going to continue to have long conversations and hopefully we should have a constitution that's not 26 pages, that doesn't repeat a bunch of redundant stuff, that doesn't have really weird double standards and that's more up to date with the responsibilities that a lot of positions have taken on.

Lastly, what can we, as the Exeter community, expect from your tenure?

I think that you can expect someone who will be more inclusive in the work that she does, and the work that I have council do. Someone who will take on a lot more policy work, and overall who will listen to the student body. I think that's a very cliche thing to say, but I genuinely think that's something I really want to focus on in addition to transparency in general. That's something I've done this year, I’ve screenshared every single one of our meeting notes docs with Principal Rawson and that has never been done in the past. We’ve gone through our conversations with Dr. Bramlett and Principal Rawson specifically, so hopefully that'll mean more accountability for the things that I say. I intend to increase that accountability because as you know, this year, there've been a lot of conversations during the election process about the accountability of the Executive Board. You can also expect a lot more anti-oppressive work and overall betterment of student life.