Each club at Manhattan High School is required to have their own set of rules and regulations, and MHS Student Council has taken the initiative revise their own constitution.

“I know it’s been a couple of years [since the last revision], but it definitely needed to be revised,” junior class president Parker Wilson said. “There were a lot of things that people didn’t necessarily understand.”

Wilson is the junior class president and sees StuCo as an fun organization as someone who is interested in going into politics in the future.

StuCo members came together to look over the previous constitution, and unanimously agreed there were terms and conditions that needed some work.

“There were a lot of things in [the constitution] that you could abuse,” outgoing senior class president Noah Shirk said. “If you were student class president, you could kick people out just kind of whenever, and you could remove any officer with only about 25 percent of the council body being there.”

With these regulations that the current StuCo did not approve of, change was necessary.

“We got together with the constitution committee… and we all got together at Bluestem for about five hours, going through all of the changes that we wanted to make,” Shirk said.

After hours of pouring over the old constitution, StuCo members came up with a new, updated version that will benefit members who will be a part of StuCo in the upcoming years.

“A major thing was… technically, before, the president actually had a lot of authority and could basically pass or veto anything they wanted to without any majority vote,” Wilson said. “We actually minimized that power the make sure it was more fair within student council.”

Wilson also states that the requirements to be StuCo president have been changed as well, and that a student needs to have two years of student council experience and one year of vice president experience. He also notes that punishment regulations have been changed as well.

“There’s a lot of cool things we amended just to make sure it was a lot more fair and equal to everyone in student council rather than just the elected officials and appointees.”

However, as StuCo represents the voice of the school, there is the discussion of how this might affect the student body.

“Our goal from the beginning was to kind of just fine-tune things for StuCo,” Shirk said. “Nobody in the student body should see anything change.”

While a job like this can take a lot of group effort and time, StuCo members still find it to be a satisfactory job and feel a lot of pride when it comes to being a part of the organization.

“I love StuCo,” Wilson said. “I plan to go into politics later and majoring in political science in college, so I think StuCo was a very good start while in high school. I think [StuCo] is very vital in high school because it deals with things people don’t quite see right away.”