Vice & Virtue: Open Forum

Vice: Open Forum Opens Serious Conflict: Is Cereal a Soup? See more below.

Hello reader and welcome to the Spambler edition of Vice & Virtue (ft. Sara Fischer!) where we review the longstanding Bush School tradition of Open Forum. Has Open Forum changed over the years to better serve the student body, or has it shifted into solely a source of entertainment for the often dreaded Community Time block? Read more to find out.

In our interview with the illustrious Sara Fischer, she mentioned the importance of Open Forum giving students the opportunity to share their own perspective. However, she acknowledged that “it’s tricky because some people really got to share from their “I” perspective, while others didn’t get to share because they were feeling awful. And that’s tricky, that’s tough.” Open Forum can create a space that turns progress into complaining or harming others, and this is a tricky thing to balance as a school. In light of this, and also the stance I must take as Vice, it’s making me think we should reject the current Open Forum and return to its roots.

In the beginning, Open Forum was held in Benaroya theater, and in this smaller space students would stand up in front of microphones and share in front of everybody. This more ‘homey’ environment could definitely create a better spark for hot takes and deep discussions. However, the older Forums would often divert towards ‘silly’ topics. As the fantastic Sara Fischer recalls, “students would be like are you sweet or savory for breakfast? And like everybody would talk about that for a little while. There weren’t a lot of pressing issues brought up like they are now.” This environment sounds much better than what we have now, as well as creating better conversations. I mean, who wants to spend their forum discussing pressing issues when we could have fun conversations?

This brings me to my second point against Open Forum, which is that it sparks way too much drama. I mean, we all have heard of the dreaded ‘is cereal a soup’ question that tormented early open forums and sparked heated debate that left the rest of the student population in shock. Do we want to return to this? Absolutely not. The divide it would cause in the Bush School community would stretch too far and wide. Just imagine how this conflict would have grown with phones dropping during every awkward pause. Nightmare-like, I know.

And now I return to my personal highlight of Open Forum, which is Open Forum Bingo. For me personally, bingo is the most entertaining part of Forum, and Sara Fischer agrees with me saying “I think that’s amazing.” She is so correct! Whoever writes these anonymous bingo cards must be brilliant, intelligent, and outstanding students. But, nothing gold can stay, and even bingo cards are losing their fun as students begin responding to questions just to gain bingo points. Sara Fischer says “if you say something, you shouldn’t be able to count it on your card.” Do we agree? Should this rule be instituted? We’ll see.

All in all, I believe we must reject the forum as it is now. Open Forum should fully transition into solely silly topic conversations and take place every other community time, so as to create space for the student body to express itself, and also to work as entertainment during the week. Also, we could add a rule that students get monetarily compensated for creating the bingo cards. Just a suggestion!

Virtue: Open Forum: The Shimmering, Luminous, Incandescent Star in the Blazing Constellation of the Bush School

Hello again, dear reader, and welcome to our totally normal and entirely serious April issue! Today on Vice & Virtue (ft. Sara Fischer), Sara, Vice and I discuss the classic Bush School phenomenon that is Open Forum. Without Open Forum, Bush is nothing but an empty husk of an institution yearning for a return to democracy. Open Forum is truly a hallmark of the Bush experience. Let’s get into why that is!

First of all, Open Forum brings us together as a student body, and gives each student the chance to learn about their peers within the Upper School. As Sara Fischer says, during this most recent Open Forum, “people were speaking from their own experience,” including many underclassmen that “got involved and said things.” What a way to bring ourselves closer together as a community connected! We love helping the younger voices in our community shine. Speak your truth, ninth- and tenth-graders!

This sentiment is especially true as Bush expands and the Upper School student body grows larger. Sara Fischer remembers earlier years’ Open Forums in Benaroya before the class sizes outgrew the space and the community had to find somewhere else to convene. Sara Fischer reflects that, in those earlier years, topics of conversation were “pretty silly,” which is naturally quite a 180 from our Forum topics nowadays. Instead of discussing whether students prefer “sweet or savory for breakfast,” for example, our most recent Open Forum covered crucial topics such as the tardiness epidemic, USS’ mild ant infestation, concerns around parking, and for one short moment, the illustrious green bins. Great work expanding our focus to pressing matters, Bush School! We’ll get those ants next time for sure—but don’t worry, the building is definitely still salmon-safe.

In addition to building community, Open Forum also serves Bush by providing a whole 40 minutes of free entertainment! The Open Forum bingos, for example, provides a whole other element of fun to the Open Forum experience. Sara Fischer herself said that she “love[s] the Open Forum bingos.” You heard it here, folks. Massive victory for the anonymous bingo community! For me personally, I think the Rise of the OFB (Open Forum Bingo) is heralding a new age of Open Forum fun, in which we can both discuss serious pressing matters and have a good time. But of course, that’s just my opinion.

Finally, Open Forum is crucial to the Bush experience for the avenue it provides for free speech. When asked what her favorite thing is about Open Forum as a whole, Sara Fischer’s immediate response was “student voice.” “It’s very Bush to me,” she says, “whe[n] students are given a space to share what’s bothering them,” and can “use [their] student voice and not be attacked.” Sara Fischer’s vision for a continued prosperity within Open Forum involves students taking ownership for what they’re saying and respectfully discussing relevant issues.

She is, however, strongly against a return to the Zoom Open Forums of 2020–2021. Thank goodness, because those were horrific. All in all, I hope you readers can now see clearly how Open Forum is in fact a central pillar of the Bush Upper School, and in fact drives our community forward towards a brighter, possibly-microphone-stand-filled future. Cue the marginally illicit applause!