JULIAN NEBREDA
STUDENT COUNCIL PRESIDENT

This is my final Student Council piece for The Standard as Student Council President. Soon, another Student Council president will be elected, and I will go back to being just another representative. I do hope that the work we’ve done as a group, and the direction I’ve moved the Council in, doesn’t simply get forgotten, which feels somewhat inevitable in a student community defined by a constant change of people. In only four years every single student in the high-school will be different. Constant change is a good thing as long as we, as a changing community, grow rather than just move through the same lessons and issues cyclically. I really hope future leaders of the Student Council take it to greater places than I could. So, for the sake of making sure that we as a group don’t have to learn the same lessons twice, there’s one thing I’ve found most important to understand over the past year.

Student groups need to be united. For student voice to be taken seriously in ASL there has to be an absolute understanding between ASL’s student groups. The Standard, Student Council and the Student-Faculty Disciplinary Board (SFDB) ( I limit myself to what I think are the groups with the greatest responsibility to students) all serve distinct functions. However, our work isn’t independent. There’s no hierarchy of student organizations – we’re all different yet we have a responsibility to represent students together. Students have to be united in our convictions and ideas and plans. In a community that’s so small and entwined this is the only this way will we be able to really achieve anything substantial. Too often in the past this relationship has been mired by truly insubstantial issues blown up by what I’ve seen as ridiculous power struggles. We represent students, either as members of SFDB or Student Council or as writers for the Standard. Our responsibility is to respect each other’s roles in the school and work together. Meetings between group leaders and members should happen often and there should be no animosity (that isn’t to say no criticism) between us.

This isn’t to criticize this year’s relationship. I think we’ve done well, and I think a newly established trend that I hope will continue is an interaction between groups regarding student issues. From “scooter scandals” to online grade distribution, we look at The Standard’s articles seriously when we see problems that affect students and can be solved. We try to facilitate conversation between the students and the administration, and The Standard is undeniably one of the best ways for us to do this. It’s undeniable that even as groups we sometimes disagree, but these shouldn’t be the defining points of our relationship and this year they haven’t been.

Looking towards the future, I really hope this productive relationship continues. There are formal ties that I hope become tradition. Just writing one piece for each issue of The Standard is incredibly helpful for both groups and for students generally. On the other end of things, we should always expect a member from The Standard in our midst during our Friday meetings. Meetings between the Council, SFDB and The Standard leaders should be formalized as well. These are all things to look forward to in the future, and what’s most exciting about them is that we as students are able to make them and grow them by ourselves.

julian_nebreda@asl.org