Taking place on Oct 29, the regular government classes held their annual elections. Students make posters, campaigns, and speeches to run for a certain legislative position, with the major position being president. Senior Tommy King talks about their campaign for president.

“I am aiming to work through our next form of our legislation unit and the powers of being President,” King said.

However, not all students participating in the election process are running for something themselves. Some students not actively running for a position are assisting others in creating and announcing their campaigns. These students also receive civic engagement points for helping out with the election. Senior Audrey McLean explains her role in helping with King’s presidential campaign.

“I helped make the posters and the merch and the websites and things like that,” McLean said.

The election is a unique simulation to the regular government classes, so it is not done in the other levels of government. The students who are actively running in the election down in the lunchroom were compiled from all the regular government classes.

“These are the candidates from all the classes,” McLean said. “There’s a speaker and a president from each class that is running currently, but there are not as many as there usually are.”

The election process that leads to campaigning in the lunchroom has multiple stages, starting with a classroom election that decides who is able to campaign further. Senior Lea Lopez explains what happens after the class elections.

“Once we win the class election, we are able to come down here, and we get to interact with basically the whole school, and we try to convince people to vote for us,” Lopez said.

While still in the classroom stage, prior to the final election, the students are starting prep for the bigger election.

“We learn about the [government] processes,” Lopez said. “We make our posters, we have speeches, we make commercials, even; it’s really fun.”

After preparation comes the advertisement. Much like real government, they prepared things such as speeches to better convince other students to vote for them in the preliminary elections.

“We’ve gone through policy making and speeches and learning the power of the presidency,” King said. “Recently, we gave our speeches, recorded advertisements, and there were elections throughout every class.”

Students overall seem to enjoy the election process and the campaigns. As a required course, this simulation represents a strong way to get students inside and outside of the government classes involved in the school and understanding political roles.

“It’s just a really fun unit that we get to do in regular government,” Lopez said.

During his second-period announcements, Principal Daniel DeBruckyer announced Wednesday’s winners. Joe Howley and Gino Colasanti will now go on to participate in a run-off election, with Keaton Don and Juliana Pina also competing for speaker of the house.