By Olivia Chen and Ammie Du
As we all know, the student council is very important to a school because it takes all of the responsibility for the events and activities such as Halloween and Christmas. Since the last year’s grade 12s graduated, the student council had to be rearranged to bring in some new blood. The school had already started for one month, meaning students were becoming familiar with each other so the time was right for the annual student union election. All the students felt so excited about it.
On October 10th, at 8:00 am, in room 522, Mrs. Fortin started her introduction for the candidate speeches. This year we started with the grade 10 representatives, where we had four candidates vying for 2 representative positions. They were two males and two females: Peter Zhu, Kevin Tan, Jenny Li and Vanessa Shi. All of them gave us some wonderful campaign speeches. Then we moved on to the speeches of the grade 11 students, where we only had two candidates: Heather Chen and Virginia Ding competing for two positions. This resulted in a vote of confidence for the two candidates. After that, came the grade 12 presentations, where we got 3 candidates: Ammie Du, Emily Wang and Roy Zhang competing for 2 positions.
After listening to all of the representative speeches, the atmosphere of the room became more intense as it was time for the battles of the higher profile positions to start. This year student council needed to fill 2 Media Officer positions while having four competitors: Vivian Cai, Milo Yin, Marley He and Elyn Wang. Also, 2 students (Fiona Lu and Anita Zhou) competed for the single position of Treasurer. It was such an intense battle between these students, where they shared their visions of what they would do if they were to be elected.
For the position of Secretary, only one candidate (Christina Zhou) ran for this position so it was a “Yes or No” vote here as well. Finally, at last, we came to the most exciting part of the election, which is the presentation of candidates for Vice President and President. Scott Shi and Ryan Cheng competed for the position of Vice President while Beatrice Ding and Jason Huang competed to see who would lead the student council this year as the President. Every candidate gave voters a wonderful and excellent speech and the votes were tense in that the gap between them was really small: some of the candidates were only two votes short of winning their positions.
At the end of the day, Mrs. Fortin announced the final winners of this election. The new grade 10 representatives are Peter Zhu and Vernessa Shi; the new grade 11 representatives are Heather Chen and Virginia Ding; the new grade 12 representatives are Emily Wang and Ammie Du; the Treasurer this year is Fiona Lu; the Media Officers this year are Marley He and Milo Yin; the Secretary this year is Christina Zhou; the Vice President of this year is Scott Shi; and the President this year is Beatrice Ding. Let’s look forward to their hard work and interesting activities this year!