As the 2016-17 school year draws to a close, brightly colored campaign posters with catchy slogans dotting the Upper School corridors are becoming harder and harder to spot. The pins and stickers so recently seen decorating jackets and jeans in the days after Democrafest have been discarded for undecorated t-shirts and shorts. Election season is over.

This year, the student body placed a checkmark next to one of three names when it came to the race for the presidency: sophomore Charlie Moog,  junior Maya Plotnick, or junior Kaden Florsheim. The race began with a total of five candidates, all vying to lead Student Government through the upcoming school year, but as the race progressed, two candidates, juniors Priscilla Roman and Martha Wedner, withdrew from the race.

In Parker’s history, there has not been a single year in which a junior served as President of the student body, according to Student Government faculty advisor and Upper School history teacher Jeanne Barr. This year Moog, a rising junior, decided to take the plunge and run.

“It was definitely difficult running,” Moog said. “The older grades resented my candidacy, partly because of my age and the fact that my running sort of felt like an insult to the class. It was definitely an additional challenge, but I had been on cabinet for two years, and I felt like there was a stark difference between me and the other candidates in terms of platform, style, and experience.”

On Friday, May 22, Upper School students congregated in two giant lines, awaiting their chance to vote at individual desks set up in the third and fourth floor hallways north of the courtyard. Friday evening, a run-off was declared between Plotnick and Florsheim.

At 3:58, the following Monday afternoon, Florsheim was announced the victor.

“I voted for Kaden because he seemed like a light-hearted person, and we need someone who will make Student Government exciting and enjoyable,” freshman Celia Rattner said. “Throughout his campaign, it seemed like he was involved and invested in Student Government.”

Florsheim states that his goals for the ‘17-’18 school year are to create alternatives to the proposal process, expand communication within Student Government, and ensure every student’s voice is heard throughout the year.

“I’m different from the other candidates in that I actively want to make the functioning of Student Government easier,” Florsheim said. “I want to expand the number of proposals, but I also recognize proposal-writing takes a long time and can be a huge process, so students don’t do them. So I want to create a more informal Facebook forum, where anyone can propose an idea and someone can work with them to make these ideas a reality.”  

Junior Jai Choudhary, who was elected Treasurer, shares Florsheim’s opinion on the proposal process. “We should either change the proposal writing process,” he said, “or have meetings once a month where I can teach underclassmen how to structure participatory budgeting proposals.”

Choudhary said that the money that does not go to participatory budgeting will go to committees and the Senate Heads. “I’ve talked to Austin O’Toole and Will Polsky, our two most recent treasurers, and they both say we have gone over budget a great deal,” Choudhary said, “so I will work with the DCA”–the Director of Community Affairs”–“to try and prevent this while still ensuring all committees have funding for their various events and functions, and the Senate Heads can still provide food for their meetings.”

The Senate Heads hold a weekly forum to which the entire Upper School is invited. Sophomores Jenna Mansueto, Sammy Kagan, and Felicia Miller won the race for the position against sophomores Emma Butler Vanderlinden, Aaron Stone, Zach Lending, and Ashley O’Toole.

The current Senate Heads are in agreement that there is a fundamental problem when it comes to transforming ideas into proposals. “This year in Senate, it sort of felt like an echo chamber,” rising junior Kagan said. “Someone would walk in and say, ‘X needs to change,” and everyone else would agree with them, but then nothing would ever come of it.  My biggest hope for this year is that if people have something they want to change, and have concrete ideas for how to change it, that we can facilitate proposal writing and allow Senate to go from an echo chamber to somewhere that inspires real change.”

Aside from cabinet, the main makeup of Student Government is committees. The DCA, the overseer of all these committees, is the final member of Cabinet. This year, the race for DCA was a hard fought one. Four people were in the running: current sophomores Pilar Grover and Desiree Shafaie, as well as current juniors Felix Wood and Jalen Benjamin, with Benjamin walking away with the victory.

The DCA for the upcoming school year is making a priority to reach out to the heads of each individual committees, and maintain regular contact with them. “Next year, I definitely want to increase the level of engagement between the DCA and the committees,” Benjamin said. “What I’ve picked up from current committee heads as well as the DCA is that they haven’t had too much communication, and were left fairly surprised and shocked when the current DCA came to grade them.”

Cabinet for the 2017-2018 year is focusing their energy on incentivizing more students to participate in Student Government, and trying to foster and maintain communication across the board. “It is really important that we make Student Government a place in which every student feels heard and can turn their undeveloped ideas into positive change,” Florsheim said.