Around once every month in Student Government Plenary, the student body receives $400 for Participatory Budgeting (PB), where students can request money to fund items that will benefit the school. However in this round of Participatory Budgeting, this was not the case.

Treasurer and senior Jack Maling sent out a Google form to the entire Upper School, where students could submit their ideas. Maling received five proposals from students — sun umbrellas for the tables outside the library, a Pop-a-Shot basketball machine, gum to be sold in the cafeteria, Spotify premium for the Music Committee, and Spike Ball.

None of these proposals made it to the auditorium stage.

“They were not feasible,” Maling said. “That’s partially on the administration, and partially on me for not telling the student body about it, and partially on the student body for not making feasible proposals.”

The only proposal that was deemed feasible by the administration and Cabinet was Spike Ball, which is set to be be voted on during the next round Participatory Budgeting, along with other, new proposals.

Participatory Budgeting was set to take place on Friday October 12, but it did not happen. In plenary, Maling announced to the student body that there was only one proposal, Spike Ball. “We didn’t feel that it was fair to make all of you guys vote on one proposal,” Maling said. “And we also didn’t think it was fair to pass it automatically.”

“We felt that $200 was not going to be enough money to buy the caliber of umbrellas that the library and the school want for the deck. For the gum, we can’t have people going around the school and sticking gum everywhere, that was a pretty unanimous decision,” Maling said. “Music committee also requested $80 to get spotify premium, and we said that they didn’t need to fund that through PB, so we just gave them money outside of that, and then “the Weekly” pulled their proposal because they didn’t feel that they had the information that they needed to ask the student body for money quite yet.”

“The one that was not approved was the basketball hoop shooting game,” Head of the Upper School Justin Brandon said. “That was not approved for several reasons. One is the amount of probably noise that it would create in the hallway. Another is, who is in charge of keeping all the basketballs secure––those machines are sometimes can be really delicate, so it can break really easily, unlike a foosball table.”

“PB is designed to give people a voice,” Faculty Advisor of Student Government Jeanne Barr said, “so it’s a perfect fit for Parker, but what we’re finding is, things that the students are putting forward are not considered to be legitimate expenditures.”

Students believe that guidelines for Participatory Budgeting are not always clear. Sophomore and Editor of the “Student Voice” Leila Sheridan said, “I think there should be a proposal guideline, because the only thing people have to say is how it will benefit the school, and with more of a guideline I think it will result in better proposals.”

Barr also agrees that there are ways to improve the quality of proposals.“What we need to do, and what I’ve been encouraging Jack the treasurer to do, is that we need a PB task force to kind of lay out what are the possibilities, what are categorically out of bounds, things we cannot spend money on,” Barr said, “and what are things that we could spend money on?”

This also has not been the first time that the administration has shot down proposals.

Last spring, current seniors Galia Newberger and Elisabye Slaymaker proposed to purchase a espresso machine during PB led by Treasurer Jai Choudhary. The proposal passed, and they were supposed to receive the money for the machine, however, the administration did not allow it.

“We thought it would be a really fun idea, and so I messaged Jai about it and asked if it sounded ok, and he said that I should totally do it,” Newberger said. “So obviously, I would have no reason to believe, as that was my liason to the administration, that it wouldn’t be allowed. Months went by and it just didn’t happen, and so I reached out to Jai again and I asked what happened and he said that it got shot down by the administration.”

“It’s such a hard decision,” Brandon said in regards to the Espresso machine, “but part of that was really that we wanted to have a conversation about the placement and everything else and that conversation never occured.”

Similar to what happened this year, this caused confusion among the students. “He said because they don’t want caffeinated students, but to me that doesn’t really make sense because we have a coffee machine that’s open to students,” Newberger said. “It wasn’t necessarily that Participatory Budgeting in its purpose was unclear, it’s just that I would love it if the administration had set out guidelines in advance.”

“It’s annoying because I wasn’t contacted and neither was Galia,” Slaymaker said, “I feel like the student body was robbed of their proposal and their voice.”

Maling hopes to prevent the problem in the future. “I want to make sure that everyone has the same understanding in what we can and cannot request through PB, because it’s not a totally free system. We have certain guidelines that we have to follow,” Maling said.