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Ian Coleman

Senior Ryan Cochran holds up a sign directing students to their section during the fall homecoming pep rally. Both Cohran and senior Alex Eichenberger are members of Floyd Central's student council.

Senior Abby Berger, president of the student council at Floyd Central, runs and plans meetings and organizes and assigns work for events like pep rallies or fundraisers.
When planning events, the council will start off by figuring out what they want to do and who’s going to be involved, and they need to know whether they are just including the student council or if they’re also going to include other groups or clubs.
Berger states, “We’ll do like, an outline, or, if we need, like, a script or planning it. And then we’ll assign jobs for different people. So who’s going to be in charge of x, y and z? And then we just kind of plan that out, and each person will kind of take charge of their area, and we just start working on each thing. And every so often we’ll just communicate what we are doing.”
According to Berger, Student Council sponsor  Katie Strandmark and the other officers are very helpful resources when it comes to emailing people and getting the plans set. They have a group chat with the vice president, secretary and treasurer to help with planning events and resolve any issue they come upon.
When the student council runs into issues, they talk it out and ask teachers for help if necessary.
Junior Ryan Miller explains the process of fixing a problem when planning an event.
“What is stopping us from achieving this? Okay, so this is the problem. How do we fix that problem? What do we need to fix the problem at hand? So you keep working backwards, and eventually you get to the root of the problem, which, if you knock that out, then all of the other problems unravel in front of that. And you’re able to eventually put in a plan, get your people in place, and then execute.”
Junior Tucker Harris, treasurer of student council, explains that they try to make the events fun so it’s something the students want to go and worth their time to participate in rather than something they have to go to.
One way they try to keep the students engaged is to keep up with the trends by spending a lot of time on social media to figure out what the students would be interested in, according to secretary Junior Rilynn Plank.
“See what kids my age are doing, see what kids at Floyd are doing, what they’re posting, things like that. And I just try to see, like, what is up to date. And so we can try to do that and obviously, if we’re trying to schedule something in advance, we have to be prepared for a trend to kind of go away. So we have to do more timeless things. But if we want to do something topical, we can probably try to fit that in there somehow,” said junior student council member Ryan Miller.
Miller believes motivating the volunteers doesn’t seem to be a problem because they want to be there, they were voted in and truly want to put in the work, but if they were to have an issue they would just talk it out.
When planning the events, the student council starts with a lower budget, then they plan different fundraisers, which leads to them being able to up the budget depending on the turnout. As the treasurer, Harris makes sure the students feel comfortable participating in fundraising events by making sure it looks school sanctioned, and he ensures the money is going in the right place. Holiday grams and crush cans are always a big hit when it comes to fundraising, according to senior Tara Srinivasan, vice president of student council.
Although the student council does fundraisers to help with the budget for events, another contributor to cut down on the cost is using items the school already has and reusing items from previous events. An example of this is when Miller and Harris last minute used the scooters in the gym during the pep rally due to the event not going as planned.
According to Harris, negative feedback is just part of it, but you must use that to your advantage to figure out what you need to do to make it better next time and have more satisfied students at future events. When there is a lower turnout than expected, Harris tries to get feedback to see why this is.
Feedback is a crucial part of planning so the student council can know what to include and exclude in the event due to the turnout of previous similar events and student and staff opinions. Right now the arey sticking with feedback from council members, but in the future, they plan to incorporate more student feedback with sending surveys.
“I think right now, we’re just sticking on like, because we have a lot of different members from a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of different variables like grades and stuff. So I think we can, we’ll just kind of listen to what they think and then write down, you know what went wrong on the right, what we can fix and just build off of that,” explained Berger.
Overall the student council believes they strategically plan events while trying to make events enjoyable for all students with different interests.