A Student Government Election Made For TV - The Sequel
This day, May 6, 2008, I spot a front page headline in my local New Jersey paper, The Trenton Times that reads: Ewing H.S vote is void a second time. I had previously commented on my hometown high school\’s senior class elections in a prior post, so I read on.
Seven students, one black and Hispanic, five black and one white, were barred from running in their senior class elections on April 23. The reason given was that the students had missed too many meetings for school activities and had not sufficiently participated in school fundraisers.
In my previous post on this election, I commented that such requirements were unreasonable for a student election; we do not require adults to show prior experience in politics to run for public office. I added that a school should have the right to deny students a right to vote if there are serious blots on their records: academic probation, repeat suspensions and criminal activity being examples. But neither faculty nor administrators in Ewing stated that any of the candidates who were denied the right to run was in any academic or behavioral difficulty.
I stepped back after writing that post and asked myself: was it possible that some of those students were in any difficulty, but the faculty and administrators said nothing, in order to protect the privacy of the students? It would have been inappropriate, not to mention embarrassing to the students\’ families to mention academic or behavioral difficulties to the media.
However, if this had been the case, then a responsible teacher or principal would have sent a personal letter to the student and their parents. But, based on reading the Times coverage, I have to believe the students were good standing or that the school didn
