By Sianna Zewdie (Y12)
Being part of StuCo has its perks, but it also has its downsides—and that’s how I ended up in the Primary Aula at 8:30 pm last Monday to watch the 2026 Governing Board Meet-the-Candidates session. I will admit, I was not looking forward to it (in fact, I forgot I was even scheduled to go at all until a fellow StuCo member had the grace to remind me). But don’t judge a book by its cover, they say, and there was more to this meeting than meets the eye.
The Art of Not Answering the Question
In any Q&A, you have answers, you have non-answers, and then there are the special kinds of responses that circle the question so delicately you start to wonder if it was even heard in the first place. This session had a number of those.
I’ll be honest: it was quite amusing to see the ways the candidates skillfully avoided responding. Some hedged—as one did when asked about his French level. He began not with a number, but with a biography: as an “international educator who oversees 13 different languages” and children who were “immediately placed in the French track” upon arrival, he conveyed enough linguistic authority to imply that the question was aimed too low in the first place. It was only when the question was clarified that the audience heard a begrudging… “Three.” (Which arguably, isn’t that bad, so the hesitation raised more questions than the number itself!)
Others were more patronizing. Willem, a fellow StuCo member, asked the candidates to clarify what ‘tough decisions’ they had meant regarding budget cuts, and a candidate, instead of answering, took it upon himself to explain what a tough decision actually was. “There are costs in your PNL,” he said. “And you cannot make a change immediately. Even though you choose to, it will take time.”
Before I continue, take a moment here, reader, to appreciate the irony of this moment. For once, and perhaps the only time in my life, I got to see the rare recursive beauty of a man mansplaining to another man. Sweet, sweet retribution, with the icing on the top being Willem’s displeased expression—the look of a man experiencing the women’s world. But the humor of the moment was swiftly undercut by the realization that his condescension was purely institutional. He wasn’t talking down to Willem because he was smarter; he was doing it because we were students.
One candidate opted for brutal honesty: at times, he would bluntly announce, “I’m not answering your question,” and spent his 90 seconds answering the much more convenient question he wished had been asked instead. It was so absurd. I felt like I was on the peak of a psychedelic trip, not sitting in the Aula on a Monday night stone-cold sober. It was the kind of performance that made me wonder if the candidate had prepared for the meeting by microdosing—or if I should have.
A Detailed Map of Nowhere
Of course, we can’t forget the most skillful way of not answering the question: answering so vaguely that you produce a response applicable to both “What are your holiday plans?” and “Why did your ex-girlfriend have to file a restraining order?”1. The waffling was mostly standard, but there was one flavor of it that I found especially difficult to digest: corporate buzzwords. Luckily for me, over the course of the session, we were treated to a veritable buffet of linguistic gymnastics. In the interest of public service, here were my top 5 phrases—ranked!
5. “The domino effect trickles down”
Dominoes fall; water trickles. Mixing the two creates a mental image that sounds smart if you don’t think about it for more than a second.
4. “We must consider the pain points, pain tolerance, and pain thresholds.”
Why is everything so painful? We’re talking about a school board, not a root canal.
3. “The Hub and Spoke model of educational progression”
This is a logistics model for airlines and Delta shipping, so applying it to ‘educational progression’ makes the school sound like a regional distribution center for textbooks.
2. “Distilled thinking… starting at the very top of the pyramid with aggregated interest.”
I’m still not entirely sure if we were discussing student policy or a semi-sophisticated pyramid scheme.
1. “If we evaluate all strengths and weaknesses—much like a Janus coin—”
The undisputed winner. I believe I laughed out loud when I heard that. My God, the sheer pretension.
Perhaps I’m being harsh—it was undeniable, after all, that the man saying these did know what he was talking about. I might be biased against corporate lingo. Or Americans. (I say, as a U.S. citizen with parents who both work in finance!)
Who Dares Address the Elephant?
There’s no dancing around it—the school has a bit of a money problem. In their defense, it’s not their fault: a certain Orange King on the other side of the Atlantic has managed to create a ripple effect almost as big as his ego that has dealt a harsh blow to school finances. Naturally, the administration is currently in search of the financial messiah—someone with enough experience to perform a fiscal miracle without the aid of a magic wand.
Some candidates, however, seemed to believe that this crisis meant they had to tiptoe around the school, as if navigating a minefield. Despite the fiscal jitters, the school remains fundamentally robust—an institution with enough structural integrity to withstand a bit of pointed criticism without folding like a house of cards. We are sturdy enough to handle a reality check, yet listening to some of the speakers, you’d have thought the school was a Victorian waif who might die of pneumonia if someone so much as mentioned the draft in the room.
Some were bold enough to break the silence: one woman reminded us that tuition fees had to be sensible—”Florimont, for example, is cheaper than us” (and if that isn’t a wakeup call, I don’t know what is.) Yet another noted the inefficiency of the school’s internal management (a sentiment that us StuCo reps felt deeply in our souls. No offense, but, you know, if the shoe fits…)
On the other side of the stage, however, we had optimism bordering on delusion. When I asked candidates to name what DEI initiatives they were so eager to implement (as practically all of them had had a vague reference to ‘multiculturalism’ in their introductions) one claimed that he believed “Ecolint is doing a great job in terms of diversity across multiple dimensions,” and that the “problem had to be defined a little better.”
Now. You probably know I have very, very strong thoughts about this response, but I really do like the Update and wouldn’t like it to get canceled by school administrators again. Therefore, I will (unfortunately) exercise a level of restraint previously unknown to man. I’ll simply say that one can only hope that, given time, he’ll realize that asking for a ‘definition’ of the problem is exactly why we need a solution in the first place…
No Taxation Homework Without Representation!
Perhaps the most ridiculous punchline to this entire affair is that, at the end, I found out that students can’t even vote. Yes—the board, the committee that dictates the reality of the school we inhabit for up to eight hours a day, is entirely insulated from the opinions of the people who actually go there. The ballot boxes are open to staff, parents, and even alumni—people whose primary connection to the school might be a dusty diploma from 1994—yet the student body is left standing on the sidelines like uninvited guests at our own party.
It is a masterclass in institutional irony. The back of our ID cards may call us “global citizens with the courage and capacity to create a just and joyful tomorrow”, but apparently, we’re too intellectually fragile to check a box today. To grant a vote to an alumnus living three time zones away while denying one to the person currently sitting in the library is a level of logic that even the most creative TOK essay could not justify.
Even more baffling is the position of StuCo. We were invited to sit in the front row as ‘student representatives’, yet we were stripped of the one thing that actually constitutes representation: a vote. If StuCo is designed to be the voice of student interests, why is that voice suddenly muted when the most important decisions are being made? It felt less like we were there to represent and more like we were there to provide the aesthetic of student involvement.
And that is the rather awkward question: why were Willem and I even invited to watch? If we’re stripped of the franchise, what was the goal? Were we meant to act as miniature lobbyists, sprinting home to ‘campaign’ to our parents over dinner? “Please, mom, Candidate B has a very progressive stance on the budget—vote for my future!” It’s a bit much to ask us to be the marketing department of an election we are not allowed to participate in.
The response when I raised this issue was a classic piece of bureaucratic gymnastics: there is a ‘possibility’ that, a few years down the line, Year 12s and 13s might be allowed to vote. It’s a lovely sentiment, really. By the time that ‘might’ morphs into a ‘maybe’, those of us currently asking the questions will be long-standing members of the alumni association, finally granted the right to vote on a school we no longer attend, about problems we no longer have, for a student body we no longer belong to. It is a perfect, self-perpetuating loop of delayed accountability, and we must hope that this time, school administration is actually serious about breaking the cycle.
Ultimately…
There were obviously many more hopeful, constructive moments in this session—heartfelt speeches that showed true commitment to the school community, and proposals that actually sounded like they would make a difference—but those are boring, so I’m not writing about them. If you’re interested, feel free to watch the video recording: it’ll almost be like you were there in real life! (…except with the added luxury of the fast-forward button!)
- These were NOT real questions. It was for the sake of a humorous article. Please don’t sue me. ↩︎