With Student Council SBA elections just around the corner, many students are asking the same question. “Why Vote?”
Many wonder if after the SBA debacle from last year that left us with an impeached student body president, what can be done to assure this is avoided in the future? The Student Council took the first steps by taking away a lot of teacher voting power and dividing it amongst students and student council members. What used to be 60% of voting for teachers turned into 30% and Students were given 20% with StuCo holding a majority of 50% of the say in votes.
Opinions amongst the school about Student Council seem to be quite divided. When I spoke to Jazzy Salazar, a Junior at Palisade, she said, “A lot of us don’t even know who our StuCo council is.” A consensus seen around the school seems to be that the Student Council is detached from the student body, yet together both hold 70% of the votes. However when I talked to Freshmen Kate Fricke and Hailey Ammons and they said, “I feel like they’re very organized and create fun things.” “They’re very school spirited and set up a lot for the school.” Some believe that the Student Council should have 50% of the votes because of all the hard work they put into making events happen.
But what about the other 20% of student votes? Some like Isaac Dady, A Junior, don’t think that their votes will actually matter. However we spoke with Laurna Lancaster, who is running for Student Body President, and she had this to say to those students, “Because they get to choose who has the hands of their future. So, who gets to decide what our dances look like, who gets to decide what kind of assemblies we have, and who gets to put together all of our fun game day activities, and homecoming week? So if they really care about our school events that everybody gets to participate in, they should care about the leaders that put all of that together.”
No matter where you stand on this subject, we’ll see if the promise of student voices being heard will actually come to fruition on voting day.