Our Platform
Overview & Goals
Mental Health
The way we see things, there is a lot of progress being made in terms of awareness and good intentions when it comes to solving some of the problems at City. However, we believe that a lot of the solutions that are currently in place don't address the root of these problems, which leads to a situation, using mental health issues for example, in which a student will go to the NESTT and temporarily address their problem, but there isn't a support system in place that aims to prevent that student from needing to go to the NESTT in the first place. We believe that this principle applies to several other structures at City, like the campaign of #StopUnexcusedAbsences or the threat of not being able to go to prom if you get fifteen of those unexcused absences. While these may get more students into the classroom, they don't incentivize students to pay attention in class, nor do they aim to solve the underlying issue of students not wanting to go to class in the first place. If elected, we will address every issue with the goal to solve the root of the problem, not just provide a temporary bandage.
Mental health is one of the most influential issues not only at City High but among all young people. Therefore, addressing mental health problems is one of our main priorities. As we mentioned earlier, we want to address the root causes of our problems, including mental health.
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First of all, we have the NESTT, which is an absolutely necessity when it comes to dealing with immediate mental health struggles. However, the NESTT doesn't get direct funding from Student Senate, and oftentimes has to pay for its own resources. If we are elected, we will establish a direct fund from Student Senate to the NESTT which we will allocate funds towards.
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Addressing mental health doesn't just end at funding the NESTT, though. We want to figure out why students are feeling like they need to go to the NESTT, and do what we can to help them. Our goal will be to address the school-related problems that cause anxiety and depression in our students.
Spending Smarter
During our time in Student Senate, we have been quite surprised by the relatively arbitrary spending policies. We want to utilize student senate's funds in a more organized and efficient manner. For example, student senate's allocation of club grants is somewhat disorganized. What happens is clubs simply submit a paragraph about why they deserve the grant (which can be up to $500), and the people that happen to be attending student senate that day decide whether the club deserves the grant. Obviously, this isn't a good way to determine the extent to which clubs deserve grants, as the amount of information given is quite low and the Student Senate process is heavily biased by who is attending the certain day. If elected, we will make sure that student senate expenditures make sense.
Another policy relating to spending that we would like to implement is a general scholarship fund for lower-income students who can't afford to be in extracurriculars. While we were going over the club grants, we noticed that many of the clubs were asking for funds that they would use on hotel rooms, museum tickets, transportation, and other additional expenses. As people who aren't too involved in clubs or something like Mock Trial, we didn't realize that some of these extracurriculars are actually prohibiting enough when it comes to costs that lower-income students really wouldn't be able to participate to the fullest extent. Therefore, we will create a need-based scholarship for extracurricular expenses so that no student is prohibited by cost.
School Information
Over the course of our time at City, we have noticed that information about things going on at school tends to be very decentralized and disorganized. Information comes in the form of the daily announcements, bulletin boards, email newsletters, etc. We want to make information significantly easier to find, so our goal will be to create a centralized Instagram account to house all important school information. This will include things like upcoming sports games, club meeting times, assemblies, and various special events going on. We will appoint someone to run this account and update it with new information in a timely manner.
Inclusivity
When it comes to inclusivity, we are committed to doing everything we can to make City the most safe and inclusive environment for systemically marginalized groups. Now, that's very easy to say, especially for people who haven't directly experienced a lot of prejudice just for existing. However, it's no secret to us that prejudice is present at school. It is our belief, again, that we must address the root of the problem to solve it.
We can have all the presentations about hate speech and all the punishments for violating hate speech guidelines that we want, but those things don't really address the root of the problem of why hate speech is used in the first place -- people who use hate speech don't experience or understand why it's so harmful, so it's just an edgy way to make fun of someone for them.
Therefore, in order to actually change things, we need to have education that both forces students to understand the historical persecution that marginalized people have experienced. If elected, it will be our goal to implement this kind of education so we can strive for an environment that is inherently free of prejudice.