The Student Government Association has been a fixture at Morristown Beard since the school’s earliest days. Acting as a bridge between the student body and the administration, the SGA listens to the concerns of students and then passes these concerns to adults in the school who can help to address them. Each year, all grade levels gather in Founders Hall and vote on candidates for the positions of each grade’s individual President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and Public Relations Officer. All students elect the student body president, who then appoints the rest of their cabinet. 

“The SGA primarily serves to reflect student opinions and basically convey them to the administration,” explains Egbefe Omonzane ‘23, the SGA President for the 2022-2023 school year. “Like a medium for students to be able to communicate when they feel like they can’t.”

In addition to their role as listeners, the SGA exists to plan events on behalf of the students they represent to help build community.  The grade’s cabinet routinely meets with their grade dean to determine what they can do and how to do it. Previous events have included trips to Funplex, tournaments between grades, and movie nights.

All students are not only welcome but encouraged to attend SGA meetings. Zachary Mazouat, Design Arts Department and faculty advisor to the SGA, said, “Anyone can be an SGA member, so you don’t have to be an elected official to come to the meetings.” Mazouat is not new to SGA, having been a part of it himself in high school. He said, “I would really love to start to build a culture where most of the people in the SGA are not elected officials. When I was in high school, the SGA meetings would have 40 students, and it was run by elected officials, but everybody in it was not necessarily a part of their grade council. Whether or not you’re a member of the SGA would have to do with your attendance at the meetings and not just based on an election.”

In recent years, the student body has expressed concerns that the SGA election process favors those with more connections to the other students over the most qualified candidates. Though Mazouat believes this is hard to combat on the grade level, he maintains that the solution to this on a more general level is further guidelines on who can run. “If things like involvement in the SGA were a requirement for running for them, schoolwide, I think that would help…[The candidates] would have to earn it in the fact that they were at least attending the meetings for the previous year.”

Omonzane, meanwhile, thinks the SGA would benefit from a more open structure. “I feel like commonly, the stereotype surrounding the SGA is that, ‘Oh, it doesn’t really do anything because, after the election, you don’t really see much,’ but I feel like if it was much more open or easier for people to access it, then it’d be a lot easier for them to process that we’re going through the order of trying to get the little changes that you guys don’t really notice.”

The SGA is always open and eager to hear the opinions of the students they represent. Anybody can come to a member with concerns or attend one of their monthly meetings. The SGA meets on the first Thursday of every month during Lunch 2 (11:35 am -12:05 pm).