Aragon’s Leadership class changed the process of electing Aragon’s class council and student body representatives. Candidates were required to give 30 second speeches in the video announcements, which were shown in class and sent via loopmail to students.
“A part of the democratic process is that your representative takes a stance on what they stand for,” says Leadership teacher Melissa Perino. “In the past couple of years, we haven’t had any such speeches, debates, nothing of that sort, so now that we were able to get the video announcements up and running, we figured it would be a perfect forum for students to be able to give a brief speech.”
“It wasn’t as nerve-wracking as giving a live speech, but I really didn’t want to see myself on the announcements,” says junior and 2015-2016 senior class secretary Lea Tan.
2015-2016 ASB Secretary and sophomore Nicoletta Della Bordella thought the speeches improved the campaigning experience, saying, “I believe the speeches in Video Announcements really helped the candidates campaign. It gave us the opportunity to introduce ourselves to the student body. This helped the voters get to know us better.”
Freshman Matthew Hahn found the speeches helpful to the voting process, saying, “I could see [the candidates] and hear them, so I could see how they [were] as a person and how they [were] at public speaking.”
Additionally, voting was done online through the website voting4schools.com, rather than on paper ballots during school hours.
“[If] the voting process takes forever, kids have to lose time out of their lunch in order to do it as opposed to doing it on their own time, so we really are trying to make things as democratic and accessible as possible in everything that we’re doing,” says Perino.
To ensure that everyone could vote, voting was extended when Aragon’s Wifi went down on April 22 and 23 to allow students without wifi at home to vote using Aragon’s computers.
Junior Anahita Ghajarrahimi, next year’s ASB President, says, “Online voting also made the entire process easier, making it like an instant gratification-type scenario because if a student wanted to vote, they could do it right then and there instead of having to wait for lunch.”
For this election, many of the ASB and class council candidates ran unopposed. Perino says, “There are so many other opportunities that students have to get involved in a leadership position. For example our clubs you know by having 55 clubs and having officers in each of those clubs that already is taking up the time of a lot of students, so it’s not that students aren’t involved, it’s just that they’re involved in club councils as opposed to class councils or ASB.”
Della Bordella says, “Running unopposed allowed me to focus on my campaign and what I wanted to do for the school rather than worrying about responding to the opposition’s ideas. This way I could already think about the upcoming school year.”
“[Running unopposed was] really stress free. It was nice knowing that I was going to win no matter what,” agrees Tan. However, she also recognizes the potential downsides of reduced competition, adding, “But it also took some of the fun out of the competition. I also have no way of knowing if people actually wanted me in their student council.”
For the ASB election, approximately 26 percent of the student body voted. “I do anticipate that we will have a better turnout next year as students become more familiar with the technology and see how user-friendly it is,” Perino says.
