Guess how many bills were passed in the school government last school year? 1.5.

Learning from previous inactive years, this year’s newly-elected student legislators are hoping to turn things around.

The school government consists of both student and faculty representatives. Last year, they were able to pass only one bill, which changed the voting procedure for electing students to school government. Another bill regarding laptop use at the school was introduced and discussed, but never voted on, according to science teacher Mary Angione, the school government’s liaison.

With the student legislators’ inability to actively introduce and discuss new bills, students have been unimpressed by their effectiveness while in office.

“The one thing that I remember them doing was making a 93 an ‘A’ a few years ago,” said junior Iona Feldman. “This was useful, but in general, they didn’t appear to be terribly active to me.”

Part of the reason why the school government has been sluggish in making changes, according to senior Arjun Mahadevan, co-chair of Legislature, is that the school government convenes every other X-block, which means that the legislators only meet approximately 80 minutes per month.

Additionally, student legislators find it challenging to arrange meetings outside of school that will accommodate everyone’s schedules.

“It’s difficult to coordinate people’s schedules outside of school,” said Angione, “and on Thursdays when we have abbreviated schedules, they usually take X-block out, so our meeting times have been actually whittled away in the last number of years when they changed the schedule.”

Another problem, according to sophomore Will Notelovitz, a student legislator, is that the legislators were fixated too much on one problem at a time. The proposed laptop bill, for example, has been an ongoing discussion since last school year.

“I feel like we should have stopped working on the laptop bill,” said Notelovitz, “because we kind of knew we would never reach a consensus on it and should have started working on other things.”

However, Angione wants students to know that there are certain areas the school government has absolutely no control over.

“A lot of students tend to talk about the lines in the cafeteria, but the cafeteria is outside the authority of Legislature,” said Angione. “There are some things that I think people feel Legislature is ineffective at, but it’s an area we don’t have any authority.”

Nonetheless, Angione does believe that student legislators could be doing more.

“I also would like to see Legislature be more visible, involving the entire school community more,” Angione said. “Because changes that get made to The Handbook that people care about should receive input from everybody.”

Echoing Angione’s sentiments, Mahadevan is anticipating a better year.

“I think last year, there weren’t many committed seniors,” said Mahadevan, “but this year, there is me, [seniors] Matt Gifford and Eden Zik, and we are all committed, and we will have to do a better job of actually getting out to the students and asking what they want because last year, we didn’t really do a good job of doing that.”

Mahadevan feels that a lot of people care about making changes this year, which is why more students ran for the legislator positions in this year’s election.

“It was nice to see 16 juniors running and 12 sophomores running,” said Mahadevan. “I think that kids realized that not only does this look good for college, but they can actually make changes in the school.”

To enable a successful year, however, Angione is urging students to actively participate more.

“I would also encourage students to seek out their representatives and talk to them and also listen to what the representatives have to talk about,” said Angione.

Student legislators also say that students should not be intimidated to talk to them about what they have in mind.

“If anyone wants to come up and talk to me, I am open to that,” said freshman Katherine Brumberg. “If anyone suggests anything, then I’ll talk to the student legislators and see what they have to say about it and if we can do anything.”

Paul Kim can be contacted at [email protected]