The Popularity Contest Before the Popularity Contest

Source: themodernman.com

I believe the school academy president process is deeply flawed, so much so that it shames the so-called fairness and inclusion that we are all told school is supposed to represent so much. But to get to that, we must start at the beginning.

How many of you, when you received the email from Ms. Reyes with a google form to submit nominations for Academy Class President pulled up the spreadsheet and had no idea who to put? How many of you, especially non-juniors, don’t know a large portion of the junior class? How many of you had no idea who even was interested in being class president? Too many.

The current system of nominations for class president is deeply flawed. In the current system, all of you received an email that looked like this:

That’s the whole email, that’s the whole nomination process…

The list of all the junior students is just that, a bunch of names of juniors with no context. I can say for certain that at least some of you know very little about most of the juniors.

This is not what is the most unfair part about this process. The most unfair part is that for you, who received this email, you had no idea who actually wanted to be president. There was no list of people interested, there was no email beforehand where juniors could sign up, nothing to let the juniors know that nominations were right around the corner.

I was asked by many students who they should vote for. This may be surprising to some of you, but I had friends come up to me and say that they had no idea who wanted to be academy president. Not a lot of my peers waited that long after receiving the email to ask me, but enough to know.

I myself only knew of one person for sure who wanted to be academy president: myself, so I mentioned a few names of people who I thought were most likely to be interested. How many of you did the same? How many of you wanted to run for president, but nobody had any idea that you even wanted to be considered?

Source: https://nicktsmith.wordpress.com/

Well, you might say, you should have campaigned more. But this argument misses the real problem of the nomination being on the very first email sent. We had no opportunity to. The only thing people could rely on was the preconceived ideas by their fellow classmates as to whether or not they wanted to run for academy president.

Part of what would be accomplished by an email sent out beforehand about the interest of the students is that it would make students decide if they really were interested, and perhaps interested enough to campaign, before the email for the nominations came out.

Instead the previously mentioned person who wanted to run for academy president but was relatively unknown exists in at least one person, me. I can say, with confidence, that many a person skipped over my name for nominations because their image of me in their mind was not a person who would want to be academy president.

Did I have any method of disabusing my peers of this idea, either through campaigning beforehand or an email saying that I was interested? This is egregiously unfair. I did not think the Governor’s academy was an institution that would be like this, allow something so unfair to be part of a process. After seeing the situation I did what anyone with initiative and integrity, some of the attributes that are supposedly so highly regarded for school leaders, would do. I pointed out the flaws and unfairness in the process and asked what could be done. 

The response I received I felt was appalling. Despite the process having “certain flaws” in it, apparently there was no recourse. The administrator who runs the academy president process looked at and understood that the process was deeply unfair, had someone explicitly point out the issues, and still decided that nothing could be done.

I could not believe that the Governor’s academy, the school that prides itself on ensuring that all students have a fair experience would so blatantly do such a thing, would take such an egregious mistake, such a process that excludes and metaphorically say, “this is who we are”.

The School’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion mission statement on their website.

Source: thegovernorsacademy.org

Most of what you would have heard, had I had the opportunity to attempt to convince you to vote for me, would have been about trying to fix voting for these types of positions. But now I have been denied the single opportunity, my one chance to run for class president.

So maybe think about that next time you hear the school espousing its inclusivity and fairness, and remember that this could be you.