1. How do you two intend to lead the Council? Will you follow last year’s StuCo President Ayse Yucesan (’18) and Vice President Charlie Victor’s (’18) lead?
Lily Noel (’19): “I think with leading the meetings we follow a pretty similar format. I think Caroline and I have noticed that this year specifically we have a really active council, especially from underclassmen, and so I think something we’d like to do is really highlight that [underclassmen] voice and make sure they feel more comfortable and open in speaking in meetings because we’ve already seen them start to play a huge role [in the meetings]. Hopefully, we can do the same for the freshmen that come in next year so that we can get the voice of underclassmen [even more] involved.”
Caroline Harms (’19): “There definitely are some traditions we are trying to keep up like ‘Star of the Meeting’, that have been really great and have been instilled by [Victor] and [Yucesan] and they’ve done a really great job so it’s a good model for us to build and follow. But, again, building on just further incorporating everyone’s voice and making sure everyone is heard.”
2. How do you plan on incorporating everyone’s voices who aren’t part of the council?
CH: “We’ve talked a lot about making things more open because I know it looks like, [students] don’t always know what we’re doing, what’s going on, so trying to have a little bit more transparency whether that be through open forums or just like an open haiku page to let everyone know what we’re doing.”
LN: “We have newly-elected officers in all the different positions and so we’ve been talking to our new PR officer [Allegra Albanese (’20)] about connecting with the students about what we are working on before plans are finalized. We’ve already sent out a few surveys about advisory programs and the house system to get students [to] voice their own ideas before we start implementing them and so that their opinions have a say in the foundations of our projects.”
3. What are your goals for this year? Any major reforms you’re thinking about?
CH: “I think the school’s unity, we’re trying to build cause you can see it during spirit week, there’s a lot of school spirit, there is a lot of community in the grades and just either capitalizing on that or making sure the grades are more interconnected.”
LN: “So I think with what [Harms has] been saying with the house system, that’s an idea that we had brought up this year and I think already we’re starting to take steps showing like a new sort of way we’re going to approach new ideas. In the past, [when] an idea would be brought up in the council and we would develop it really far and we would bring it to a stage and then we would inform the students ‘OK, this is what we’re doing’ and we didn’t really give much student input on what [we were] doing. So communicating in the early processes like we’ve been doing is really a goal for all of our future projects.”
4. What should underclassmen know about you?
CH: “This is such a hard question, I hate describing myself because I don’t know what to say. We’re definitely both really committed, we really care about the school and everything, everyone’s opinions and what everyone thinks.”
LN: “I would also hope that they would know us as familiar, friendly faces. We really want a council that has the voice of every student, and part of that is just underclassmen being able to come straight to us and communicate with us.”
5. What do you hope your legacy is?
LN: “Well, I hope that…we can have one event or one new thing implemented that’s different from sort of the classic things we do like … spirit week and Bangers & Bash and Back-to-School Bash. Those are things we do every year and that’s great, and I love that sense of tradition that we can support, but I also want something new to implement in the school that’s completely different but the students have been involved in that idea and are interested in that. No matter what that is, if we are able to accomplish that I will think we’ve had a successful year.”
CH: “Actually, that’s what I was going to say, that was something that I had run on originally at the beginning of this year and something I ran on as Vice-President. I was new this year, so I love all the traditions and I love that I’ve become a part of them, but it would be interesting to see if we could introduce some new things. Maybe broaden people’s horizons, experiment with something else and I think that’s what we’re working with right now.”
Written by Managing Editor: Online Christina Leonard
Photo by Alexandra Gers
