April is election month for local offices like school board seats. In March, Rolla High School experienced its own election for Student Council (StuCo) members. StuCo does this to simulate an election for a larger government body and to give students an on-the-ground view of politics. From Mar. 4-8, 2024 the student body voted for their pick for the 2024-2025 Student Council officer team. The votes were revealed on Mar. 12, 2024.
Sophomore member Maria Polizzi describes what StuCo means to her.
“StuCo is a club that works for the student body. We deal in leadership, connection building and making sure our students feel equally represented and acknowledged by their peers. We do little things like Sing-A-Grams to [plan] some of the year’s most memorable events like homecoming weekend,” Polizzi explained.
Every year StuCo holds its annual elections for its executive board. Next year’s officers are as follows: president, sophomore Rebekah Cook; vice president, sophomore Alyssa Gosche; secretary, junior Morgan Moats; treasurer, sophomore Bridgett Starns; historian, sophomore Sophia Yang; publications director, sophomore Carissa Ayres; assistant secretary and treasurer, junior Gianna Starns.
Elections are a very important time for the RHS StuCo. While the general student body only sees the videos and votes, there is a lot more to the process.
Sophomore Alyssa Gosche, who won the title of Vice President, explained that process.
“To be considered as a candidate, members submit a package of information that includes the signatures of all of their teachers, 40 student signatures, and signatures of extracurricular advisors along with what position the person is running for. Then Bridgeman reviews these and candidates submit their speeches to him, we record, the videos go out and voting goes live,” Gosche said.
Gosche also added about the struggles of going through the election process.
“The elections are really exciting for our members who want to run the council and be extremely involved in all that we do. It can be stressful to promote yourself and your image, and to compete with peers over a position, but in the end there are no hard feelings and we will all have a part to play next year. Recording a video of your speech was very stressful and I would say worse than public speaking in front of a crowd,” Gosche reminisced.
Sophomore member Rebekah Cook, who won the title of President and is already starting her new presidential duties, expressed her thoughts on the StuCo election environments.
“Elections make the environment slightly more competitive like people are like once Bridgeman announces officer packets are coming out. Everybody’s kind of just like ‘oh, I want to be in charge of this. And I want to be in charge of this.’ Because they want to like show like how good they are in their positions. And like say that they can run and that people can trust them. But it’s not. It’s not a major shift. It’s like a slight shift. That you just notice over time,” Cook said.
Through all this hard work comes the voting period. However, people still question why they should vote. Many students don’t vote because they don’t see reason to.
Polizzi, on the other hand, feels that voting can be a great way for students to learn how elections work and get practice with making large decisions.
“People should be voting for these things because these elections work just like any other. It is a privilege in itself to get to vote for the people who represent you, but more than that, it is important that all kinds of students are voting for these things, because the officers will then most accurately reflect our student body and our interests. These officers do more for our students than the general RHS population will ever know, so it is important that we pick the right people for that job,” Polizzi said.
