Students Take the Lead with Student Vote for CAS Project

It was a successful voting day on October 23 at Glenlyon Norfolk School, and a lot of the success was due to Francesca Cumberbirch ’21 and Vanessa Leibel ’21, who led the student vote at the Senior School for their IB Diploma CAS project.  “We worked together with direction from Ms. Nielson to promote and sort out the details of the BC Student Vote for our provincial election,” explained Vanessa. “That included making announcements in assembly to raise awareness about student vote and why democracy is important. Then we researched the candidates and parties to post for everyone to see. As well, we organized election day specifics.” They shared their research with the Senior School through an assembly presentation and on display boards in the main hall. The information was specific to the Oak Bay-Gordon Head riding and included all of the candidates running.  Before election day, Francesca travelled with fellow Grade 12 students Hannah Yin, Luca Gaffney and Anders Woodruff to the Beach Drive campus to talk with Grade 5 students about the importance of voting.  “We talked about democracy, and we wanted to get them involved because they are part of the future,” said Francesca. “We just let them know what democracy is, why voting is important and then the Grade 5s were also running a student vote for the whole Junior School, so we wanted to compare our results once they were released.”  On the day of the election, Vanessa and Francesca set up the ballot boxes and polling stations in the Gudewill Learning Commons. They chose to focus on the student vote for their CAS project because it allowed them to learn more about the government and to get hands-on knowledge for when they become eligible voters next year.  “This was really good to give me extra information and to do something that was across the whole school interested me because I like connecting with people,” said Francesca.  “Being eligible to vote next year was something I was thinking about, so when we heard this opportunity was coming up, and an opportunity to take a leadership role in it, I really wanted to,” added Vanessa.