As gentle claps emerged from room 220, the Forum Council (FoCo) presidents were announced. In the closest race ever, Toula Greenawalt and Isla Tharp were declared the winners of the annual FoCo presidential race with a five vote win.
During forum on Thursday, March 12, CHS students voted on their picks for the new FoCo presidents for the 2026-2027 school year. Through a process called ranked voting (learn more about it here), 324 students voted for the future of FoCo leadership.
With posters adorning the halls and stickers covering students’ laptops, the FoCo candidates had been working tirelessly to boost their campaigns. Throughout the past couple of weeks, the candidates worked in many ways to earn student votes, including going around to forums to speak about their goals, sharing slides with classes and more.
The candidates for this year’s race included Ella Weinberger and Sofi Das; Isla Tharp and Toula Greenawalt; Milly Sandstrom and Walker Ledbetter; and Ellora Kirbat and Jessica Rothstein. To learn more about the candidates and their campaigns, read the “Meet the Candidates” article here.
The winning candidates, Greenawalt and Tharp, had a detailed outline already put into place before their win was announced. This consisted of several main points: bringing in a diverse and intrigued incoming student body to CHS, forum and school-wide engagement and a new recycling program.
Tharp and Greenawalt created their campaign around forum engagement, reaching a wide audience and helping students maximize their Community experience through the CR program and school spirit activities. Tharp described their campaigning style as trying to reach as many people as possible.
“To campaign, we tried to reach out to newer faces, and just get ourselves out there as much as we could,” Tharp said. “We did the classic stuff like stickers and candy, and then posting was new this year so that was a bit of new terrain. We were also seeing what the other groups were doing, and sort of keying off of everyone else to see what people liked and would respond to from us.”
In addition to this, the candidates also had to be aware of other factors such as the other people in the running.
“Being proactive is really important, and planning is really key,” Tharp said. “We also had to be mindful of other candidates, because there’s a lot of overlap in what the teams were trying to accomplish, and establishing a unique identity was good to try to differentiate us as much as possible.”
The person who announced the winners was history teacher Ryan Silvester. As the advisor for FoCo, he feels that the FoCo presidential election is a time for growth for anyone and everyone.
“I am so proud of all of the candidates regardless of who won the race,” Silvester said. “Each pair had ambitious campaigns and has already contributed to FoCo in so many different ways.”
Nic Villamor, a senior at CHS and member of FoCo, said the announcement was structured a bit differently than last year.
“I remember last year we were playing games and waiting for the last counting votes from the Root forum,” Villamor said. “But this year, we were just waiting for one final candidate, and when she was here, Ryan just immediately jumped into it and went on to announce the winners.”
As the year begins to come to a close, Tharp and Greenawalt are ready to jump into the role of FoCo co-presidents.
