What—And Who—It Takes To Pass A Meaningful Town Meeting Proposal

So you have an idea for how to improve the school. You know that Athenian has a process called Town Meeting that allows students to submit, debate, and vote on proposals that would change school policies. You might worry that this process isn’t very effective for making bigger changes if you’ve looked at the proposals we’ve passed in recent years, but I was somehow able to pass a proposal that completely changes and reforms the school’s attendance policy. That clearly means Town Meeting actually works exactly how it should—right?

The idea for the proposal wasn’t mine. A couple people in my advisory brought it up after the Town Meeting in which we debated whether students should be allowed to take their shirts off during sports practices. The former policy reduced letter grades in a class by a third per unexcused absence, so they mentioned how missing class negatively impacts grades anyways. Initially, I was concerned about classes like E-Band, which aren’t directly graded based on cumulative material you’ll have to catch up on, but rather on participation. Then I remembered that participation involves showing up.

I liked this proposal. Several arguments in favor were already bubbling up in my head. Seela Haidari ’22 submitted the idea in the Google Form that was sent out, and we waited. The following week, Seela told us that Hollis Carey ’22, one of the Town Meeting officers, told her that the idea had been shot down by the administration. We collectively sighed and moved on.

Some time later, it was announced in an email the day before and at a Morning Meeting the day of that there would be a meeting on Friday at lunch between Mod 1 and Mod 2 to discuss possible changes to the attendance policy. I usually spend lunch on Fridays at Poker Club (this article is not sponsored), but I was invested enough in this proposal that I begrudgingly decided to skip gambling for the day and bring my lunch of pizza and cherry tomatoes to the meeting. I invited a few friends to come with me, but due to scheduling conflicts and fear of large discussions, we decided I would be the delegate representing our perspective.

This ended up meaning that aside from a couple of the Town Meeting officers, I was the only student at this meeting. Almost a dozen faculty members showed up over the course of the meeting, including several administrators, but I’ve never been particularly afraid of adults, so I stuck to my guns and argued my points.

This proved difficult because everyone at the meeting seemed to be discussing different things. A few teachers seemed to agree with me, but I found myself repeatedly clarifying that no, I’m not saying unexcused absences shouldn’t be recorded; yes, some people can easily get tardies and absences excused, but not everyone; and wait, why does any of this mean that we have to reduce letter grades by a third per unexcused absence? The meeting came to no satisfying conclusion while I was there. I had to leave so as not to be late for my Justice For All class, which is several layers of ironic, probably.

Despite the relative inaccessibility of this meeting to those who fear public speaking, don’t frequently and thoroughly check their emails, or already had things planned, what bothered me the most about it was the assumption that we all had to come to a consensus in order to write up a proposal. I’m a student, and I’m supposed to be able to bring forward any proposal I want provided I get the required number of signatures (I wasn’t sure how many because I couldn’t find the by-laws anywhere online, but it turns out it’s only 10).

The following Wednesday, we had a special schedule that put A period at the end of the day, after four other classes. For me, that was Calculus BC, so I spent the latter half of class writing up a proposal to entertain myself. A couple classmates made some suggestions, and on Thursday night, I typed it up, printed it out, and pocketed it in preparation for the Town Meeting ideation session that was supposed to happen on Friday. 

I showed up to the ideation session ready to challenge the entire school to come up with a reason my proposal wouldn’t work. I sat down and waited with bated breath for the announcements to finish—and waited, and waited, and slowly realized that there was going to be no ideation session at all. After pacing around Knoll 2 ranting in French (and reviewing the past tenses), I handed my proposal to Dean of Students Susie Childs at lunch. She said she’d pass it along to Head of the Upper School Meadow Davis.

I let the issue rest over March Term, but I later sent a carefully worded email to Meadow and the Town Meeting officers asking if they’d received it and what my next steps should be. A week later, I sent a follow-up email and attached the proposal, and at lunch on Friday, as I went to sit down, I saw Chad McElroy ’22, a Town Meeting officer. He apologized for not responding to my first email. As I assured him that it was fine, the other officers and Meadow started showing up, and all of a sudden, I was at a meeting. 

Fortunately, I’d been thinking about it enough that I was prepared to present a defense of my proposal at a moment’s notice rather than being sent into a panic by an impromptu meeting. They all liked my proposal, and they told me that they would get it approved by the Leadership Team on Tuesday, I could get the signatures on Wednesday, and the proposal would go to Town Meeting on Friday. The meeting was short enough that at the end, I walked across the lawn and arrived to Poker Club right on time.

The following Tuesday, when I got on the bus, I opened up Teams and saw that Hollis had asked if it was okay to, per the Leadership Team’s request, change the last line of my proposal from “If a student is frequently missing class, their advisor and the Academic Dean will work with them to develop a plan going forward” to “...the Academic Dean will determine disciplinary consequences.” I typed out a polite response explaining that the whole point of my proposal was to make the policy less punitive, so that kind of defeated the purpose. Then I checked my email and saw that the edited version of my proposal had already been sent out with my name on it.

During this process, I’d been frustrated at times, but now I was livid. I sent a slightly less polite email to Meadow and the Town Meeting officers explaining that if they couldn’t change the proposal back to what it was (with a line at the end about determining consequences if absolutely necessary as a compromise), I didn’t want to sponsor it. A Teams exchange with Hollis later, we did indeed update it to that version, and I sighed and shifted my focus back to Tech Week.

The Town Meeting on Friday wasn’t particularly interesting. I blanked and forgot all of my good points when I was speaking in formal debate, but I was proud enough of my wording in the proposal itself that I didn’t care too much. To nobody’s surprise, it passed in a landslide. Meadow told me I’ll be included in the process of translating the proposal into an actual policy. I think she got the message about not changing it without my approval.

Of course, the point of all this isn’t actually that passing a significantly impactful Town Meeting proposal is easy, or even particularly doable. I was only able to because I was very stubborn and unintimidated and did most of the work myself. I was very deliberate in the wording of my proposal, touching on several points Athenian likes to talk about (such as restorative justice and equality in grading), and I think if I’d simply brought forth my idea and asked the officers for help writing it up, the proposal at least would not have been what I intended. I also suspect I would’ve had to try even harder if I had broken rules in the past.

However, I think the main issue with the way Town Meeting works is that the meeting itself isn’t actually that important in the grand scheme of the process. The challenge is getting the proposal approved by the administration, not by the student body. I understand why proposals go through the Leadership Team, but acting as if this is democracy is misleading. At the very least, Athenian needs to make the process of getting proposals approved more transparent and straightforward and, frankly, more emphasized, because as important as it is, it’s absurd to pretend that the actual Town Meeting is the part that really matters.