After a unanimous vote in their June 4th meeting, the Kenai Peninsula Borough may start to see some younger representation from student council members.
According to the ordinance (2024-10), the Borough hopes to be able to have high school students participate more in local government, and having them come and speak before the Borough would be a prime way to do just that. Opportunities like this would allow high school students to share their school’s interests, concerns, and activities with the Assembly, Mayor, and the public.
Assembly member Ryan Tunseth and Vice President Tyson Cox both sponsored the bill.
Cox explains that the assembly has never had a student body representative in their area. Getting those representatives to come in during the school day to participate in meetings would also be rather difficult. But Cox believes there might be a solution to this problem.
“So what we came up with is, why not have a representative of the local councils of these student bodies come and talk to us and give a regular report,” said Cox.
When this concept was discussed at the Borough’s April 2nd meeting, the Vice President did ask that any suggestions members had be discussed through the city clerk.
The main topic that came up was the length of time.
Borough meetings can vary in length of time; some meetings can take hours to complete. Luckily, after some amendments were proposed, the idea seemed more achievable.
“The 1st amendment is, is there amendment to section one is just to clarify. We added KPBSD high school students student council presentations with prior notice 10 minutes and only when needed. So that will only be on the agenda when there’s actually a presentation available… And the combination of council presentations and presentations with prior notice may not exceed 2 presentations per meeting. And then under B3 it would add each KPBSD high school student Council may be allowed up to two presentations per year,” said Cox.
After all the amendments were made, the ordinance passed, indicating that the community can hope to see student representatives in the Kenai Peninsula Borough Chambers in the near future.
