The SSC bulletin is a weekly article covering the events at each Monday’s council meeting.
The Student Staff Council entered room 104 on Monday, Sept. 8 for their first meeting of the 2025-26 school year. No freshman representatives were present at the meeting because the freshman class has not yet elected its SSC representatives. Elections will take place during the class meeting on Monday, Sept. 15. Assistant Principal for School Life Quinn Killy brought a variety of Frito-Lay chips and Oreo cookies to the meeting, and SSC President Grace Khuzami brought store-bought sugar cookies and brownies.
During the meeting, representatives discussed their goals for the school year and focused on improving student mental health, scheduling more grade bonding activities and increasing communication with the administration about school policies that directly impact the student body.
Khuzami began the meeting by asking each representative to introduce themselves and one of their most important goals for the school year. Multiple representatives said they wanted to decrease stress and create a stronger sense of community within grades, especially for students who are new to GDS. Last year, grade representatives held grade-wide activities during some class meetings, but the events were not regularly scheduled.
Khuzami scheduled individual meetings over the course of the week with each grade’s representatives to plan their community activities for the year. Sophomore representative Zach Prober said most students only come to SSC-run activities when the council offers food incentives, and he said he wanted to improve activities such as SSC office hours so that students would want to attend even without the promise of food.
To further the council’s student stress-relief measures, senior representative Sarah Sakr suggested the council create more mental health support in the school beyond the annual Mental Health Teach-In Day, but she did not specify any plans she wanted to enact. Sophomore representative Sam Leveton suggested students receive their graded final exams from each class, so students could understand their mistakes and feel less stressed—as he believes students are after finals—that their teachers misgraded their exams. In most classes, students only receive their final exam grades in their report card after the end of the school year.
Khuzami said she wanted to get the council’s most time-consuming plans underway at the beginning of the year in case any of their proposals took several months to complete. She said one of her main goals was to increase the council’s communication with the administration about the phone policy and a new English department policy that requires that all first-semester assessments take place in class. With the increased communication, Khuzami hoped the student body would have more voice in changing both policies.
Sophomore representative Ella Maas said she wanted speakers with more diverse political views to speak at assemblies, which was one of her campaign promises. Killy said the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) office had already set the assembly schedule for the year, but he suggested Maas reach out to the DEI staff to see if they had already finalized individual speakers for each assembly. If not, the council could help to choose those speakers.
The council also discussed holding more frequent fundraiser breakfasts to raise money for school events, as they did for the 2025 Winter Semi-Formal. Killy suggested that the council could reinstate bagel breakfasts and sell bagels in the Internet Cafe, which he said SSC had done in past years.
As the meeting came to an end, Khuzami asked the council for snack requests for future meetings. Killy said he had researched Oreo flavors in June and found over 75 available flavors, and several representatives said they wanted to try as many flavors as possible. Killy encouraged the council to take the last of the meeting’s Oreo cookies as representatives left the classroom.