Eby McKenzie ’20 and Aidan Barber ’20
McKenzie: “The two of us, our motivation was to help the students have a voice. I have been seeing how many students are upset with the new sign-in rules and students don’t like how faculty are deciding things for them. So I think coming in, I wanted to change that and make it so that students could actually be apart of decisions for their well being, and actually weigh in on things stuff to help them…We hope to create more of a bridge between the students and the faculty, because I feel like that is what the purpose co-presidents are, they’re like our representatives.”
Ash Cohan ’20 and Layomi Oloritun ’20
Cohan: “Two things that we really wanted to focus on were community and we wanted to focus on mental health. So like I just said, I’ve been talking to Dr. Patel, Dr. Farnsworth, and Dr. BJ, who are the Psychiatrist, the Head of Sykes, and a Therapist on campus, because I wanted to make sure that the things that we were proposing were actually realistic and doable…We wanna have student support groups because we think that Andover can often be very isolating, and knowing students that are in a similar situation would make Andover feel less alone, and we think that’s really important.”
Sebastian Romero ’20 and Shahinda Bahnasy ’20
Romero: “Mental health is one of the biggest issues that face, not only our campus, but campuses throughout the United States. One of the things that we wanted to do specifically on our platform; there was a Andover health app that came out actually last year, and out of the people who I have talked to so far [while] collecting signatures, only three of them have known what the Andover health app was…What we want to do is…we want to make sure that it is re-implicated…By no means is that a solution to tackle the whole mental health issue, but definitely it is a step in the right direction to increase the awareness of it, and the prevalence of it.
Emma Slibeck ’20 and Mark Witt ’20
Slibeck: “[We want to have] more forums and discussions like All-School Congress about parietals like the last congress, but also about mental health and what that means on campus, what more can we be doing, and having an open student-faculty conversation about that. Also, how can we support queer students on campus? How are we supporting students of color on campus? Making sure that that’s a campus-wide dialogue, not just in the community or among people of color, just making sure that’s an opportunity for everyone.”
Marianne Bautista ’20 and Henry Hearle ’20
Bautista: “We give great importance to communication. It’s important that we as future Co-Presidents are approachable, that student council in general is a group of people that students can reach out to. In addition to a suggestion box in Paresky Commons, we will review those comments with student council because we believe it’s a group effort. It’s not just us trying to change the school—it’s student council as a whole and the school as a whole trying to change.”
Harry Kahane ’20 and Isabella Di Benedetto ’20
Kahane: “Bella and I both are both drawn toward being leaders and helping people where we can because that’s what we want at the end of the day…I think the most important issue that’s on everybody’s mind is mental health and stress. Stress is there. It has literally disabled people. They can’t go to class, that kind of thing. We think that an effective way to reduce stress on campus is by increasing the number of cuts, especially considering the new schedule that is going to be implemented… It doesn’t make any sense.”
Peter Ling ’20 and Ianna Ramdhany ’20
Ling: “We want to focus on better relationships between faculty and students. We feel that this past mid-year reflection was very unsuccessful in the sense that while it was a good idea, it only left students feeling like they had to do additional homework and created an ingenuine relationship because you can’t elaborate on your true feelings through a typed document. For a lot of students, they don’t even know who’s on their team. I feel a lot of students wouldn’t feel comfortable trusting every faculty member with that information in opposition to their trusted adults on campus.”
Editor’s Note: Shahinda Bahnasy is a Photo Editor for The Phillipian. Peter Ling is an Advertisement Manager for The Phillipian.
