Remember, I’m pulling for you; we’re all in this together.
—Red Green
When I was in high school, our ASB president tried to actually change stuff. The school wouldn’t let him, even really lame things. I remember him knocking student council in an interview with the school paper.
Later, he got expelled for selling acid on campus.
~Kyla
“You couldn’t fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.”
and heaven forbid they ever get a budget. The idea being to apportion it out to different groups who actually have events which need to be funded (i.e. Model United Nations, which actually has to travel to be active) but instead they decide to keep the money for themselves so they can buy free foam fingers and tissue-paper baseball caps to hand out in a feeble yet expensive attempt to promote school spirit. You wanna promote school spirit? Fund something worthwhile! Maybe pay for a hotel room for an MUN or mock trial or any other academic interest which actually requires leaving the campus, and give students a reason to be happy to be in school!!! Of course if by some miracle these groups ever got to a competition, and came home with a trophy, the student council would be the first to try and share the spotlight.
sorry. I didn’t much like my high school, and one of the main reasons for this is that the Student Council actually had the power to do something, and they didn’t. I always found it amusing that they’d find a problem, and rather than acknowledge that the system was failing because of their own lack of participation, they’d rewrite their constitution. Every fucking year. And they’d point to it and say “look at this! Next year it will be different because we’ve instituted this new system”, but of course the new system would fail for the same reason: its success required the dedication of the students on the student council, and no student council I’ve ever seen at that school ever had enough dedicated members to ever get anything done. Whenever I’d bring a real issue to them that they could solve, they would instead delegate the responsibility of solving that problem to me. Whenever I pointed out that THIS IS WHAT THEY WERE HERE TO DO, they’d put it on the agenda, discuss it, not vote on anything and consider that “dealing with the issue.”
whoa. Lots of pent-up frustration just got vented here. Man that felt good 
TT
“Believe those who seek the truth.
Doubt those who find it.” --Andre Gide
Well, that’s why I asked; I was never aware of student council ever accomplishing anything. I know many of them don’t do much of anything, but what are they supposed to do? What’s their ostensible purpose?
Remember, I’m pulling for you; we’re all in this together.
—Red Green
Um…be student leaders?
I have no idea what that means, either. Did anyone else see “Election”?
~Kyla
“You couldn’t fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.”
The purpose of student councils has almost always been to fool students into thinking they had some level of self-determination. It’s a scam. Personally, I was glad of that. The jerks who always end up serving on student councils are not people I would wish to have have any power over my life at all.
A secondary purpose of SCs was to supposedly give students a little taste of what adult politics are like. Actually I was later very disappointed to find that adult politics are not unrelated to those in high school. Everything’s a popularity contest, rather than related to ability or policies. Jerks win. Very little gets accomplished in comparison to what the politicians claim they have in mind. Money occasionally mysteriously disappears. And the minions do not bother to rise up and overthrow the stooges, even though a majority agrees that the rulers are bozos.
Enjoy your Christmas dance.
I don’t remember our HS student council doing much, except a float in the Homecoming Parade. And I think they helped organize Spirit Week and stuff like that.
But junior high, the student council president got elected on a campaign platform of chocolate milk in the lunchroom. (Well, maybe other things, too, but he actually DID get the chocolate milk for us. Heck, we were like 12, that was important to us.)
Your Official Cat Goddess since 10/20/99.
“I get along well with everybody.” --I.M.F.
Student councils were a chance for students to democratically elect people to represent them and make decisions. None had any power, since the administration had to agree, but it was useful as a way to make minor rules.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
Read “Sundials” in the new issue of Aboriginal Science Fiction. www.sff.net/people/rothman
Kat said:
A chicken in every pot, and a carton of chocolate milk on every tray…
Our student council handed out funds, somewhat, but it was mostly an admin puppet. There were people every now and then who wanted to change the system, but the system was set up so they couldn’t really change much. Newspeak, anyone?
Question authority–just not mine.