Student Council has transitioned to a new method of collecting student feedback: adviser nominations and personal invitations. The new plan has worked better than a series of unsuccessful student forums last fall. 

“At the beginning of the year we held a few forums that had practically no turnout and overall just didn’t go well,” All-School President Ben Cifu said. 

Ben explained that he thought there was a low turnout because people weren’t aware of the purpose of the forums: to hear feedback from students and address their issues on topics such as homework load. 

Sophomore Kira Sekhar said that although she cares about the topics being addressed, they didn’t seem worth attending. 

“I respect Student Council a ton, and I think they do a great job. I just don’t know how much power they actually have to make a real change,” Kira said. 

Starting in December, Student Council has taken a new approach. Advisers nominated students they thought were passionate about some of the issues being addressed and Student Council randomly emailed 100 of those students across all four grade levels inviting them to come be a part of these forums. 

So far, two meetings using this new format each yielded about 20 students in attendance. 

“The first was really productive. We talked about midterm comments and what’s useful in them and what’s not,” Ben said. “The second one was more about the new semester schedule and got a little sidetracked, but overall they both went really well and we think that model of sending out an email to specific people but then making it clear that they can bring friends works really well.”

After the semester ends student leaders plan to have another forum including the faculty organizing the switch to semesters, so they are able to hear students’ thoughts about how first semester went and what could be better.