ASB Advisory Opinion: Exploring student say in administrative policies

After trudging through her three long periods on Friday, junior Dani Bruno sighs, realizing that her day is only half over. Due to the school’s current schedule, she has to rush to softball practice and then return home to complete seven classes’ worth of homework, which are all due Monday.

Last year, a full block schedule was proposed for the school, but some do not think students had enough influence in the decision.

“I don’t think students were really informed or had a say in the full block schedule,” Bruno said. “I don’t think teachers realize how busy we are on weekends and how much homework we end up having to do because all our classes were on Monday.”

Student representation and student say in administrative decisions, such as implementing a full block schedule, have been recurring issues at the school.

“I wish students had more say because the students are the majority of the school,” Bruno said. “They are the ones it affects the most, which is why they should have had a bigger say in the final decision.”

To combat this lack of student representation, ASB members have formed the ASB advisory opinion, a forum for talking about issues that revolve around contemporary issues on campus. In December of last year, senior Samuel Liu came up with the idea for the advisory opinion, in which a group of elected officials at ASB meetings (roughly 30 or so students) vote on contemporary issues.

The resulting, written and nuanced “Advisory Opinion” is presented to the administration. The goal is, according to the school’s revived constitution, to contribute “Added discourse … the ASB — the students’ voice — resolves to positively contribute to this dialogue … to formulate the best, most-educated decisions.”

“We saw this as an opportunity [to] get student opinion from the student council and present an official student stance on the issue,” said senior ASB treasurer Robert Eng. “The administration would make decisions and we saw these decisions had no organized, formal student input.”

Recently, the advisory opinion tackled the issue of whether to mention honors and very high honors next to the names of accomplished seniors on the graduation programs.

“It’s important because this is about what students feel comfortable with, and how they want to be represented on their graduation day,” senior ASB board representative Desai said. “It's wonderful that [principal Paul] Robinson listened to our pleas for more student opinion on school matters and immediately gave us something to work on.”

Last graduation, Robinson said he decided that honors and very high honors would not be mentioned on the programs in order to promote a more positive environment at graduation time and to “celebrate everyone’s accomplishment.” The decision was controversial. 

“I’ve had parents contact me that they didn’t like my decision, and I’ve had many contact me that they agreed with it,” Robinson said.

This year, Robinson has left the choice up to the ASB, since it is the seniors that will be graduating. As a result, the advisory opinion has decided to omit any mention of honors on this year’s program.

“We don’t want students to feel bummed on their graduation day because their name isn’t in ‘very high honors,’” Desai said.

Eng added that one of the main goals of this new advisory is “to formally voice the opinion of the student body to the administration who hold the real power to implement change on campus.” 

For example, last year April 8, 55 percent of the school staff voted to not establish a newly proposed full block schedule. This left many students unhappy and caused them to reflect on whether they were getting enough representation in administration policies.

“Students had almost no say in the full block schedule discussion,” Eng said. “The vote was totally carried out by the staff in Ms. Patel’s room and the only student participation came second hand when teachers informally asked their students what they thought.”

In response, the school staff and about 600 students took the School Site Council survey on whether the schedule should be changed to a full block. More than half of the students, 53 percent, favored changing the schedule. Although the survey reflected the student body’s opinion, it came far too late, for the decision had already been made. 

By forming the new advisory opinion, the ASB hopes to increase its communication with the school administration and try to stop similar problems from occurring again in the future.

“I think it gives all student governments more purpose and responsibility, which is what all the students signing up for student government are really looking for,” Desai said.