In addition to continued planning for prom on May 3rd, the Student Senate began planning the class of 2026’s presidential election, which will be held sometime after AP testing ends. For the 2025-2026 race, all juniors will be excused for a period to listen to speeches and vote instead of being held during an extended advisory.
“Mr. Bacon does not want to do an extended advisory for the student senate candidate speeches because only the juniors will be doing something,” Steve Tygrett said.
Similarly to other years, in-school campaigning, such as posters, cannot be done until after May 1st; however, other campaigning, like social media accounts, can be used before that date.
“Just to keep a fairly compact election, we’re building that parliamentary model, where you only get to campaign for like three weeks because otherwise, you’re going to have a lot of election fatigue. So, no posters or things can go up until the first of May,” Tygrett said.
Any posters that do go up after May first also have to be stamped by the main office first, a consistent student publicity rule. Another issue relating to elections discussed was students voting based on popularity, as opposed to who they feel will best represent them in things like the graduation speech and future class reunions.
“We’re also going to quell the candidates’ speeches a little bit because it’s not anybody’s fault, but they’ve kind of gotten out of hand,” Tygrett said. “It turned into a bit of a circus act, and I think that kind of distracts a little bit from the overall message that we’re trying to achieve because we’re not trying to run a popularity contest. We’re trying to get members of the junior class to select the person that they want to represent them.”
After discussing the election, prom talk picked back up. Ticket sales will begin April 23rd; there will be no pretzel bites due to the cost of keeping them warm, and there are plenty of chaperones.
“It’s a $200 charge to have a chef stay and prepare these pretzel bites to serve them warm. So I said, let’s just skip that,” Melanie Gibbens said.
