Student Council Decides Committee Co-heads
By ERIN HAN, CJ SMITH, and MONA YADAV
Alongside the newly elected Student Council President, Vice President, and Co-Secretaries, many Exonians were recently elected to serve as co-heads for the various Student Council Committees.
Committees include everything from public relations to mental health, and students of all grade levels are welcome to join. As a new policy, each committee must have at least one member be an underclassmen. In light of a strenuous and exhausting year, Student Council committee members have made it their priority to serve as interlocutors between the administration and the student body. With several policy goals, like closed door visitations for seniors and more fun and frequent events being pushed off, the committee heads also hope to advocate on behalf of the students.
“We’re supposed to foster transparency and excitement around student council. So far in the past couple years, the PR team hasn’t been doing a good enough job of that,” remarked newly-elected Public Relations committee co-head Lauren Lee. Lee outlined the steps that she would take as co-head to increase dialogue with the student body. “We’re going to create campus catchup videos to further create hype and excitement from the student body towards the student council and hopefully get new members and more members for the various committees that we have.”
Tech co-head Alaysha Zhang explained why she applied for the position. “Exec reached out to me and asked if I would like to join tech as more of the graphic side. Then in the future when we work on Stuco projects, we can also improve the design aspect.”
She also explained how tech committee would work to help other committees. “We want to help them in whatever way possible — if they need any forms set out or in overall helping manage communication in the case of a PR committee.”
“So I wanted to help the school return back to normal in a sense.”
Lee also explained how she would accomplish her goals as co-head. “As peer co-heads, Nikki and I are planning to meet biweekly and recruit more members into the PR team so that we can be a more robust committee.” She further reiterated her main promise to members of the student body. “I plan to be someone who has transparency as her greatest priority.”
Lower and Recreation Committee co-head Anna Holtz explained what the committee does. “We’re responsible for planning events. For the most part, dances are our biggest thing, but pep rallies are another big one. And then we also hold carnivals, and little things throughout the year. We’re just trying to make campus more fun,” she explained,
Holtz also shared why she decided to apply for the position: “I wanted to be involved in dances, especially since the year I came in, we had COVID-19 and all that. So I wanted to help the school return back to normal in a sense and I just love dances and parties and all that type of stuff. So I just thought that it’d be a good role for me,” she said.
Outlining her plans for her tenure, Holtz said, “Well, next year, we want to hold a lot of dances, specifically some sort of homecoming dance. I’m not it that but students really want that to happen. We’ll also organize pep rallies for all three terms, and I really want to do a carnival in the spring. And we also want to organize some sort of little indoor events for next winter, and then maybe another carnival in the fall, right when students get back to campus.”
Reflecting on last year while looking ahead to the future, Holtz said, “Last year was tough. Because of the winter term, we couldn’t have a winter formal, but I definitely think next year is going to be a great year. I felt like a lot of last year was figuring out what it takes to be a good committee co-head and learning all these skills. But now that I’ve had a year of experience, I think it’ll really help me for next year and just being able to accomplish more.”
Upper and Policy Committee co-head Andrew Yuan briefly explained the role of the committee. “Our committee is basically responsible for communicating with the deans and the administration about what StuCo is working on. We coordinate with the Exec board of Stuco to come up with a set of policies that we want to be passed both on the student level and also on the faculty level. We also solicit opinions among students about what changes they want to see in terms of going forward in campus life. We try to come up with a compromise between the student body and the faculty members to the best of our ability to satisfy both the student’s demands and also the administration’s requirements. Overall, we connect Exec with some of the policies on their priority list and we try to pass them with the consent of the faculty,” he said.
Yuan wanted to become Policy Committee co-head because of the importance and responsibility of the committee. “I applied because I think policy committee is a committee of much use, and it’s a very effective committee in terms of communicating with the different academic departments, communicating with deans, communicating with the administration to deliver what the students might need in terms of both their academic life and their life at Exeter as a community. The policy committee is working on some really interesting pieces of legislation so I wanted to be involved with that,” he explained.
Yuan has many plans for his tenure as committee co-head. “First of all, we’re trying to create and publish an internal report on what the past Policy Committee has done and what we should be working on our future goals for this committee…We’re just trying to work on picking up some work that the past committee has done… So specifically that would look like picking up work on CCC reform as well as working on the new visitations policy that has been in the works for two years. We are also examining the medical leave policy, especially in conjunction with the Mental Health Committee and also with CAPS and the deans,” he said.
“I feel like listening to students and hearing what people want us to do, planning wise, is the most important thing.”
Some of the more compact goals of the committee involve language in absence emails and department policy reforms: “A small project that the past committee started in the last term is trying to change or work around the dicky’s email language, so we’re trying to make it softer and more acceptable to parents and the student body. So that we will be working with Dean Griffith on. The primary upcoming goal we have is trying to get faculty members to have assignment feedback within one or two weeks because we know sometimes assignments can take a very long time for faculty to get back. We also want to focus on the schedule and changing it. We’re going to try to take samples from our sister schools and use that to revise and reform our schedule. So we’ll be working on that with a CVP group,” Yuan said.
The committee also wants to create a liaison system with various faculty. “And another thing that we’re trying to create as a Policy Committee as a whole is to establish some subcommittee liaisons with departments… Right now we’re thinking of department chairs only, but if there are relevant faculty members that we should also be connecting to, we will establish that as well,” he explained.
Explaining how the Policy Committee will work to support students, Yuan said, “So I think the Policy Committee has these differing agendas and we’ll try to work with Exec to the best of our ability. Not all of our policies are dependent upon Exec, and at the same time, not all of Exec’s policies have to go through us. I think one thing is trying to balance the number of policies that we can pass in a manageable manner so that we can satisfy the student body, but at the same time trying to accomplish compromise.”
The main goal of all these committees is, as Yuan said, “to listen more to the student body. If a student has a particularly strong opinion about one thing that they see as unsatisfying in the school, I recommend they go out to the entire council so that they can give us feedback on that. So just more communication with the Student Council in general, more communication with the student body, and better engagement with both the faculty members and also with administration.”
Holtz felt similarly, concluding with, “I feel like listening to students and hearing what people want us to do, planning wise, is the most important thing.”
