Mr. Vice President Elect
by Rob

It's official. After a second school-wide vote today, Nathan Hileman is Schalmont Middle School's Vice President Elect for the 2007-2008 school year.

About two weeks ago, he came home with news that he had decided to run. He described the process of becoming a candidate; it sounded daunting to me. He was required to get the signatures of 3 faculty members and 30 students who would support his candidacy. All of the signatures on his petition had to be exclusive. I was impressed when he completed the process, but discouraged when I found out that he was in a field of 7 seventh grade students running for the position.

Last week was campaign and voting week. As is often the case around here, his fliers and speech were prepared at the last possible time. It was a late night on Tuesday, which wrapped up around 10:00 PM, when I sent him to bed and got in the car to drive to Kinkos to copy fliers. He read his speech on the announcements the next morning, and then voting took place on Friday. At the end of my day on Friday, I ran into Mr. George, Nate's English teacher. He had come to my building to pick up one of his own children. He told me that there was going to need to be a second vote. Four of the seven candidates were eliminated as a result of the first vote. The second vote was to take place this morning.

At 2:55 this afternoon, as my chorus was leaving, I got paged to the office for a phone call. It was Nate: "I won." There was a hint of "Can you believe it?" in his voice.

When I arrived home this afternoon, there was an email waiting from Mr. George. He just wanted to share the good news with me. He wrote, "woohoo!" I couldn't agree more.