⭑ Joz Butler ⭑
For Student President 2021-2022
Hi, I'm Joz Butler and I'm running for student body president this year! Thank you for taking the time to visit my site. If you click the buttons below, you can check out my qualifications, goals and examples of my previous proposals! It would be an honor to represent you this year. Election day is April 19 or April 20, so please remember to vote!
about
Hi there, I'm Joz! You may remember me from some of the theater productions I've been in (I was the dead clown in Addams Family), from the work I've done with the Pelican, or just on a tiny window on the computer in one of your classes. I've never actually run for student council before, in fact, I kind of avoided it because I didn't think I could get things done. But after proposing my town halls idea in the council this year, I realized there was so much more to our government than I thought, and I wanted to get involved more directly. I'll be returning to campus next year, so feel free to say hi if you see me in the halls!
I have experience in the arts, graphic design, computer science, scheduling, and management. I hope to be able to use my computer science skills, since knowing CSS/HTML/Javascript has helped me a lot in the Pelican work I've done.
For this election, I'm running for the position of president because I would enact policies that will make change. With my experience in managing organizations combined with my intense stubbornness, I will be a leader who can get things done. I want to open doors for the people who come after me to implement ideas with less bureaucracy. I've seen many projects abandoned from lack of structural support, and I want to be that structure for you. It might sound cliché, but I just really love helping people!
contact
email: [email protected]
I also have a discord, feel free to ask me for it!
expansion
After reevaluating the government comes expansion. Much like the first process, expansion would be happening in the background of other proposals so the government could still push other policy through.
Expansion would cover, but not be limited to, creating new documentation for the Council, creating new pathways for or types of proposals with different timelines so that certain ideas could be passed quicker, new government roles, additional transparency policies, strengthening connections with other student groups like clubs or classes, updated/ new information systems for the Council to use, additional responsibilities for council members and more!
Expansion would be a group effort and I plan on utilizing student surveys frequently to see which issues the student body would like addressed first. Of course, I realize that survey interaction is fairly low, so incentivizing interaction with the government and streamlining survey accessibility would come before attempting to collect student feedback.
There are a lot more specifics I could go into, and I have a lot more ideas, as well as potential plans for events! Feel free to reach out if anything on this list interested you, or you feel like any of these would be good ideas, I'd love to help get them done!
evaluation
The first step to my plan is to learn about the Student Council. I've spent the past year learning the details of how Student Council function. But as a non-council member there are limits to what I could learn. I want to be comfortable with the history, the adults involved, the schedule, everything, before I really start doing things.
Once I've studied the council's history, I'll start methodically determining if each detail of the council works as it should. This would potentially involve rewording/ rewriting our constitution as well! I'd like to call frequent meetings with the Council to discuss with the whole team on what they think. If a piece works, we'll keep it; if it doesn't work, we'll make it better.
Ideally, since this is only structural changes to the government, there won't be much adult feedback necessary, since the Council is supposed to be student centered! This can fast track the work, and remove it from potential wait time added with proposals. I plan to draw up new documentation as necessary to inform about how the Council will function and its role.
It would be great if we could draw up a small, fun video to share with the school about the changes we've made after we're done (and to highlight council members)! At the end, a short survey to the students on their feelings about the government would finalize the process, and I could shift my focus to expansion.
I imagine this work would mainly fall to me, unless other Council members wanted particularly to help me out! I don't want other proposals to have to stop just for this, so I can take the majority of the work and make sure to engage with the team regularly to make sure I'm on the right track.
previous proposals
original town hall proposal
fall elections proposal
I proposed the town hall idea (without the slideshow, sadly) this year; I reached out to Ms. O'Toole, the Student Council Advisor, and was invited to a meeting. During the meeting I also proposed the fall elections idea, but was not reached out to follow up with, and, due to my workload currently, could not pursue it for this round of elections.
Hopefully, my art can make things a little bit more enjoyable when you read through the more dense logistics!