Leadership held All Student Body (ASB) elections during the last week of April, results were announced the following week. The four ASB officers elected are members of the class of 2018, consequently, there will be no senior ASB officers for the 2016-2017 school year. The junior ASB officers for the next school year will be President TK Dahlke, Vice President Robbie Samec, Treasurer Ellie Evans and Secretary Jacob Reniessan. Dahlke and Samec ran against current juniors Margaret Stoops and Edyn Jensen, respectively, for their positions, while Evans and Reniessan both ran unopposed.
“It’s definitely unusual for an ASB president to be a junior,” Dahlke said. “But to have [all ASB officers] be juniors is especially different from the years that I have been here, and I think the years in the past even before I’ve been here.”
“You typically have seniors in [ASB positions], especially as a president and vice president,” leadership adviser and social studies teacher Tim Morgan said. “In years past we have had juniors as ASB secretary or treasurer but it was a very interesting outcome, both very close races, that juniors did prevail to take those spots.”
(Next year, English teacher LesLeigh Golson and Social Studies teacher Nathan Bernstein will replace current leadership advisers Morgan and Jessica Variz.)
Evans thinks that the reason no current juniors were elected has to do with a small candidate pool resulting from a lack of awareness about leadership and ASB. “I don’t think people really know that ASB is available, I don’t think it’s really advertised that well,” she said. “I think most people at the school think that ‘Oh only leadership kids do that,’ but in reality every single kid at Tam can run for a leadership position.”
Samec credited the number of officers from the class of 2018 to the drive among the members of the class. “I think there’s a pretty strong leadership community amongst all grades, but there’s just kinda more push from the class of ‘018,” he said. “They just wanted to be higher elected officials as opposed to the current class of ‘017….I mean we have two positions that ran unopposed, that were both incoming juniors.”
The fact that none of the officers, including the President, will be seniors could present some challenges, but the officers are prepared to handle them. “There’s always the chance that the seniors aren’t gonna respect our authority as much because it’s the younger generation governing the older kids,” Evans said. “But I think the leadership class as a whole is a really good group of people….I honestly think it will still run just as smoothly as it does this year.”
Samec agreed. “I think that there will also be some benefits, because we understand underclassmen a little bit better because we ourselves have been underclassmen most recently. But I don’t know if it’s gonna present any benefits or challenges that can’t be handled,” he said.
Despite the absence of seniors on ASB, Dahlke wants to make sure that the seniors are not forgotten. “It’s gonna be interesting next year, I know that I’m gonna want to get a lot of input from seniors,” he said. “Since [we will know] they’re not on ASB to see what they think is going on, because as seniors they have been there the longest and should have a large voice in Leadership.”
Looking forward to next year, Evans wants to improve the spirit of Tam. “I feel like Tam doesn’t have that much school spirit and I think that we need, as a leadership class, to try and reinforce the spirit of Tam by having fun activities and getting kids more involved with their school,” she said. “I really wanna make sure that next year we have more events and activities for students, and promote students going to school sports games, which we didn’t do this year.”
Samec has similar thoughts about involving students. “We have new leadership teachers next year so we’re gonna be kind of trying to kinda reorganize the leadership structures and start working more towards just kinda getting a stronger connection with the student body itself,” he said.