Student Council Executive Board Details Visions for Tenure
By 145th News Editors
On Feb. 14, the Academy was notified via email of the Student Council Executive Board Elections results. The election results announced that for the 2023-24 school year, upper Kevin Treehan will serve as President and upper William Soh will serve as Vice President. Upper Emilia Kniestedt and lower Caspar Bailey will serve as the two Co-Secretaries.
With four positions on the Executive Board available, candidates spent the last two weeks campaigning on social media, collecting signatures, and writing candidate statements. Candidates running for the President position also participated in a school-wide Presidential Debate during the assembly block. At the end of those two weeks, 68% of the student body cast their votes and the 2023-24 Student Council Executive Board members were elected.
“When I opened up the email and I saw everybody's names, my immediate reaction was, ‘This is gonna be such a good year.’ I feel like we're all bringing together different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences,” Kniestedt said.
“It's a pretty eclectic group. The fact that everyone that was elected actually knows each other is pretty special. And I'm really looking forward to working with everyone here,” Bailey said.
Kniestedt recounted that some plans for this upcoming year include building long-term relationships with Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), being more transparent with the faculty, prioritizing student feedback when it comes to mental health on campus, and making the Community Conduct Committee (CCC) process equitable for students.
Especially regarding the long-debated visitations policies, the Board hopes to address policy reforms by fostering trust with the faculty. Treehan described their plans for developing mutual understanding between the student body and administration.
“We’re not going to be pushing for systemic change right off the bat, but more on building a relationship with the faculty and getting them to trust us to understand where we're coming from while proposing different things,” Treehan said.“We probably won’t go straight to closed-door Vs, but we’ll work with them on building up to what we want as a student body.”
The Board hopes to create change within the visitations policies to represent the student body’s interests and uphold campus-wide mental health. Treehan said “some people would like to play chess and some people would like to have sex. The idea behind that was students need space to do what they want. We go to a school which is basically our home too. So, we need to be comfortable in the space that we have.”
Alongside an improved visitations policy and open conversations about mental health, the Board also plans to implement major changes within the Student Council.
Soh recounts the addition of a technology committee, “We made a tech committee this year. I think it's beneficial to utilize a tech committee so we can have legitimate, anonymous student input. This is so people feel the freedom to say what they actually feel; so we can come into meetings with the administration and approach policy change, both within Student Council and with the administration, with as many student voices as possible.”
Soh continues, recounting one of Treehan’s ideas for encouraging continuity across council committees. “We plan to have at least one underclassman co-head per committee…This is so we have continuity between every year on committee goals and what they've done, and so we have at least one person that knows how a committee runs and knows what to do.”
Bailey looks forward to the upcoming year, concluding “we're here to advocate for the student body. That is our goal at the end of the day as the Student Council Executive Board. And I think everyone here is committed to following through and achieving that.”
