At Shanghai American School, the student council is a vital platform for student representation and leadership. Every year, students from each grade claw at the opportunity to become one of the school’s student leaders. Officially, these councils are supposed to provide a voice for the student body, organize events, and foster a sense of community. Although everyone seems to applaud them for these tasks, no one seems to know how much STUCO actually is contributing to the our student experience. Additionally, over the past year, many controversial changes have been made to the school have created a lot of confusion and commotion among the student body. In this article, Pudong Press will be investigating the reality of STUCO and their true contribution to the school.  

When asking the general student body for their feelings about STUCO and their significance, we received various responses. One student says “I’m not really sure what they’re up to, but I appreciate the effort they put into the grade level meetings.” Another student believes that only STUCO Executives Sophia (’27) and Michelle (’26) have an impact. In response to this, we asked Grade 10 STUCO member Kaylee Huang for her opinion. She believes that, “Even if it doesn’t seem like it, we put in a lot of work as STUCO to complete our activities and events.” 

One of the main problems the student body seemed to have with STUCO was the change(s) made to the club schedules. This year, clubs were arranged to meet every week, other than the days that hosted both Honor Society and regular club meetings. This schedule was implemented to ensure that clubs that originally met every other week would have more opportunities to operate. However, this resulted in a lot of issues with planning and taking attendance due to the absence of consultation with execs beforehand, creating a club schedule with conflicting dates. When I asked Sophia Su, the Finance Executive for STUCO, she responded that there wasn’t anything they could do to fix the issue because they were not the ones who made the changes in the first place. They had previously tried to address some of the student’s concerns through the Town Hall Meeting with Mr. Velasco, which mainly focused on the issue of clubs and the new schedule. Surprisingly, STUCO also seemed to have their fair share of issues with this schedule. Sophia Su thinks “The intention of the schedule change was good, because it was supposed to give people time to attend all their clubs frequently. But the issue is, everyone seems to be confused or simply not care enough to follow the schedule, so the schedule is not actually being applied properly.” 

While investigating STUCO, the topic of CAC, a little-sister organization to STUCO, was brought up naturally. I asked STUCO execs and grade level STUCO members for their opinions on CAC and their overall contributions. The opinions were unanimous: they don’t really do anything. The main role CAC plays at SAS is their management of service clubs, compared to STUCO that manages regular clubs. We then found out that STUCO and CAC frequently collaborate for financial endeavors, but even those are coordinated by STUCO. Another similar sentiment shared by STUCO was that CAC was just a way for the school to give out more leadership roles and somewhere for the “STUCO rejects” to go, rather than make an impact. Whether this opinion was shared out of contempt or blatant honesty, CAC seems to be completely absent in the coordination of high school events, other than their minimal monitoring of service clubs.

Another burning question among students was about the specific amount of control STUCO has over its own projects. In some cases, school administrations exert significant control over council activities, dictating which projects are viable and which issues can be raised. This can lead to a disconnect between the council’s goals and the actual needs of the student body. However, when asking the STUCO members themselves, they said that although there is a lot of administrative control, it serves a good, productive purpose. Some STUCO members expressed their gratitude towards administrators Profa and Ms. Em for their work on keeping everything in order, and for acting as a final source of judgement for many projects.