Dear editors of the Scholium,
In a recently published article, members of your staff expressed frustration at the new lounge competition rules imposed this year and criticized the student council’s “apparent lack of power”. The student council would be more inclined to consider these grumblings in earnest if Scholium members had waited until after the lounge competition to denounce the new rules. Perhaps if they had, they would have noticed the overwhelmingly positive feedback about the new lounge competition rules from both the student body and the faculty.
The Scholium article also maintained that restricting the resources available to each class “limit[s] creativity and school spirit”. The Student Council believes that standardizing competition materials actually fosters ingenuity rather than hinders it. In past years, the grades that spent the most money on decorations usually won the competition. The Student Council provided more than adequate resources to each class and a one hundred dollar budget for decorations of its choice. Yet, the authors still suggested that these resources were “not enough to complete a theme adequately”. The senior’s “Under the sEA” lounge is a testament to the inaccuracy of this claim.
But the great sum of “money required to go ‘all out’ to decorate” was not Student Council’s only motivation for changing the lounge competition rules. Our primary concern was the long cleanup and tremendous monetary damage that the competition caused for only one day’s worth of excitement. Episcopal’s maintenance crew spent countless hours cleaning up leftover materials and repairing the lounge long after the students had forgotten spirit week. Last year, students inadvertently stripped the paint off of the walls with non-painter’s tape and the damage was only repaired at the end of the year at Episcopal’s expense.
The authors suggested that the “apparent lack of power” of the student council was a result of overbearing student council advisors. They insisted that “the student council advisors need to become more inclusive of the student body and the Student Council representatives.” But Nisha Meyer, our student council president, conducts every meeting and puts each issue to a vote among council members. The faculty advisors’ role is not to dominate council discussions but to mediate between student representatives and the school faculty. As to faculty advisors’ inclusiveness of the student body at large, student council meetings have always been open to the public but only two students have attended a meeting this entire year. The student council hopes that this letter will encourage increased attendance at our meetings during activity period on days 4 and 10 in the boardroom.
The Student Council understands the necessity for student feedback on any action we take. But sensationalizing every change introduced by our representative body in order to fill Scholium content quotas is not an effective dialogue between council members and the student body. The student council would be happy to discuss any criticism of its policies at its meetings, which have always been open to the student body. We kindly recommend that, in the future, Scholium members come to some of our meetings and understand how we function before criticizing the policies we implement.
Sincerely,
Nick Mead and Devin McLaughlin

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