Editor’s Note: The piece below was published in The Weekly’s 2020 “Joke Issue.” All content, quotations, and other features are entirely fictitious. 

Roughly 300 Upper School students run around, each trying to stand in front of a designated area of the crowded space they are in. Colorful signs with the names of Student Government presidential candidates adorn the walls, each sporting a logo and an accompanying slogan. In the middle of the chaos stand the candidates for each Student Government position: President, DCA, Treasurer, and Senate, each giving passionate speeches to persuade students to stand close to their assigned corner.

For the first time in Parker history, the Student Government will be voting by a caucus-style process to elect our 2020-2021 Student Government Cabinet. While the switch was originally seen as risky, students and faculty were persuaded by the Democratic Party’s overwhelming success in Iowa.

As the caucuses work, candidates gain ‘votes’ by however many students decide to stand in their designated area. Once every student has stood by a candidate, the results are calculated, and if a candidate does not get 15% or more of the votes in the room, their supporters must leave and stand by a different candidate who they would be willing to vote for.

Members of Cabinet instigated this switch and received support from Student Government advisor and history teacher Jeanne Barr. “At first, I was hesitant,” Barr said, “but after the tremendous job the caucus system did in Iowa, I was immediately persuaded.”

The Caucus system required lots of planning and strategy from Cabinet members and lots of regulations and technology to function. Cabinet members spent roughly twenty hours each week preparing the library for the Caucus, with some even pulling all-nighters to make sure all would be well come Election Day. 

Originally, the plan was to use the Big Gym to house all 300 students but based on the success of previous Club Fairs in the library, the administration decided to give the space to the middle school and hold the vote in the Kovler Library. Thanks to the extensive and necessary renovation that occurred two years ago, students were able to find a bit of space to stand, with some sitting on bookshelves and others crowding in the TIDES garage.

The creators of this Caucus system were trying to envision a new way to get the entire student body even more involved in Student Government. “We tried to think of a new way to get people to pay attention during SG and to assure that their eyes and ears were engaged in the process, instead of, well, their Airpods and laptops,” DCA and junior Carter Wagner said. “With this caucus idea, we realized, ‘what could be more engaging for a community than to stick them in an isolated room and make them run around to different candidates for hours?’ It was the perfect solution.”

To many, the idea of a caucus perfectly encapsulates Parker’s mission statement, in that it provides a space for the concept of an “embryonic democracy” to be put to practice. Administrators were so delighted with the ability to demonstrate just how real an embryonic democracy is that they decided to document the entire process on their official Twitter (@fwparker). “It was for the good of the community for us to broadcast this to our 1,000 followers,” an administrator remarked.

The Caucus was possible thanks to the help of a smartphone app used to track results, similar to the app used in the 2020 Iowa caucus. Cabinet members insisted that this app was by no means related to the one used in Iowa. The Iowa app was created by a firm called ‘Shadow,’ while the much more reliable Parker app was designed by the growing firm ‘Shady,’ a startup created by current President Matthew Turk.

Students were pleased with this new system, with Cabinet members reaching their highest ever recorded level of community engagement during a plenary session. In a Google Form sent out to the community, 98% of students stated that they would choose to attend Student Government more frequently if the same level of engagement was implemented for all presentations. 

As a result of Parker’s tremendous success with the Caucus system, several independent schools in the Chicago area are also choosing this way of voting to select their future student leaders. Latin, Lab, and several other independent schools have made this switch, hoping that this efficient and thorough method of voting will be the key to involving the whole school in high school elections.

Sadly, the results of the caucus were lost, due to bugs with the app used by vote counters, forcing students to have to vote the old-fashioned way: paper and pen. However, this minor setback has yet to deter the caucus from reappearing next year. “We’ll get it right next time,” Wagner said. “There’s no possible way the app could malfunction for a second time in a row.”