Thank You!

Hello Everyone!

I'd like to thank everyone who voted for me and everyone who supported me! Earlier today, I was elected Governor of Southeast JSA with 80% of the total votes cast. 

As you can imagine, I'm immensely excited for next year and what we're going to see happen in JSA. I've already begun work on assembling the cabinet that will support me throughout the year.

I would like to thank my chapter members, who supported me, several girls from the Benjamin School who were of great help in distributing my campaign materials, my father, Tim, who helped my print out 200 fliers, and finally, my opponent, Niko Tzoumas, who made winning the dance competition, if not the election, easy for me.

I would also like to congratulate Jared Oddessky, who was elected Lieutenant Governor and who I look forward to working with next year. 

Thanks everyone!

~TS Allen
Governor-Elect, Southeast JSA

Thank You!

A plan for expansion, improvement, and success!

TS’ FIVE PROGRAMS

My five programs, as outlined below, are all designed to help improve JSA. Each will work in a different way, and each is individually necessary and designed as a stand-alone program. But, when all of the programs are implemented when I am elected, they will complement each other well, as explained in the chart.

Program One: Expansion and Statehood

Southeast JSA has only been a territory for a few years. The state of Florida and its school-age population absolutely have the capacity to support a JSA state, but that hasn’t happened yet. I promise to lead Southeast JSA into statehood. While the title itself is basically symbolic, it symbolizes an increase in the number of chapters under the organization and also an increase in activity in those chapters. It is my firm belief that by working toward statehood we can greatly enhance Southeast JSA.

 

Program Two: Minicon Support

The minicon is a useful tool for the Junior State of America. I plan on promoting what I call expansion minicons. I will expand JSA using expansion minicons, planned and organized by willing chapter leadership and with as much assistance as I can provide, that will help explain the organization to students from schools that don’t yet have JSA chapters, to prospective new members or chapter founders, and also give a taste of what our actual conventions are like. After attending these expansion minicons, students not yet in JSA will become interested, and hopefully form new chapters and thus expand the organization.

 

Program Three: Expansion of Activism

I will encourage activism in all JSA chapters. Activism is a way to increase the standing of JSA on campus and to attract recruits. An important part of our organization, it is also noble for us to support causes we believe in. JSA is a

state-wide organization that has chapters in most areas of the state. By distributing petitions to individual JSA chapters, JSA members who chose to support these petitions can become active in their government and also support causes they believe in. We will select and distribute petitions within the nonpartisan spirit of JSA.

 

Program Four: Convention Preparedness

I will use the minicon as a tool for convention preparedness. Minicons will be encouraged to use proper moderating procedures to train moderators for conventions. I will do all that is possible to provide a cabinet member to minicons to help explain moderating procedures. I will encourage cabinet members to attend and will attend as many as possible myself.

 

Program Five: Internet Infrastructure

Southeast JSA has a limited budget for communications. Luckily, in the modern world, any human can sit atop a powerful telecommunications network. I intend to bring Southeast JSA in to the modern era, making our leadership easy to contact, as they should be in any small organization, unifying our membership, and promoting discussion among leaders and members. With this program, JSA leaders will listen more to the membership and be more responsive to the popular will. The Southeast JSA website will have its content improved and expanded under my leadership.

Current Posters

Old-School Logo

Cool, Modernist Poster

Platform Conclusion

These five programs are my creations. They are based on my own ideas and what I’ve heard at conventions, my discussions with you the members, my discussions with teachers, chapter presidents, and state governors. They are my creation, but they are our vision. They are my distillation of what I’ve heard others say. And in order to make sure that they stay this way, one of my programs is designed to keep me and my cabinet listening to what you have to say, to keep your vision from becoming just my vision.

Program Five: Internet Infrastructure

Southeast JSA has a limited budget for communications. Luckily, in the modern world, any human can sit atop a powerful telecommunications network. I intend to bring Southeast JSA in to the modern era, making our leadership easy to contact, as they should be in any small organization, unifying our membership, and promoting discussion among leaders and members. With this program, JSA leaders will listen more to the membership and be more responsive to the popular will.

 

The Southeast JSA website will have its content improved and expanded under my leadership. This will cost JSA nothing and will not necessarily involve much work. As of now, little is put on the website by the cabinet because the website is little used by members. I will expand the website’s usefulness, creating a natural increase in use. This expansion will include posting of more information about JSA, more guides as discussed above, more convention information, more activism information, and more multimedia recruiting and expansion tools for chapter presidents. The website will become another centre of the organization.

 

I will work to set up a blog for the state cabinet and also a Southeast JSA forum. The blog will allow JSA members to be generally kept informed on what we’re up to, including expansion support and activism. It will be updated as often as individual cabinet members see fit. The Southeast JSA forum will be a discussion board open to all JSA members. Chapter presidents will have powers to invite members, and it will be an independent entity from networking sites like Facebook. This forum will be official and will be set up to allow JSA membership to communicate directly with cabinet and to allow discussion of important issues. It will also allow quick dissemination of information by the chapter cabinet, something that I believe the membership should be able to expect in the modern age.

 

One of the goals of these programs will be to make state cabinet more accessible. My cabinet will be more responsive to the popular will thanks to the forum and the blog, it will accept more input from members than any previous cabinet. It is my belief that any JSA member ought to be able to contact me, even if it is through their chapter president. I believe the same should be true for all cabinet members. The blog will allow membership to see what we are up to, the forum will allow them to voice their opinions and provide debate topics, activism ideas, and any other concepts to not just the cabinet but to the chapter membership. 

Program Four: Convention Preparedness

I will use the minicon as a tool for convention preparedness. Minicons will be encouraged to use proper moderating procedures to train moderators for conventions. I will do all that is possible to provide a cabinet member to minicons to help explain moderating procedures. I will encourage cabinet members to attend and will attend as many as possible myself.

 

One of the major issues that arises at Spring State is moderating. Moderators are often unprepared and unknowledgeable. This is understandable, they are poorly taught. I will change this not only by making sure that proper moderating procedures are taught and used at conventions, but also through a broader education program. A guidebook and video will be made discussing proper moderating procedures, produced by my chapter. We will also improve the last-minute information provided at the beginning of convention. Moderators, often freshman who have attended few or no conventions, will thus know what is going on, and we will see much better moderation.

 

I will encourage individual chapters to hold practice sessions for the debates at conventions. In order to facilitate debate practice, I will try to make debate topics and legislation available as early as possible. If chapters have debate topics early, they will have time to run through the debates their newer members are participating in so that their membership can be better prepared for the debate. It is always easier for a new debater to discuss a topic they have discussed previously.

 

Program Three: Expansion of Activism

I will encourage activism in all JSA chapters. Activism is a way to increase the standing of JSA on campus and to attract recruits. An important part of our organization, it is also noble for us to support causes we believe in.

 

JSA is a state-wide organization that has chapters in most areas of the state. By distributing petitions to individual JSA chapters, JSA members who chose to support these petitions can become active in their government and also support causes they believe in. There will be no requirement to distribute petitions, but they will be selected based on humanitarian interests, to be attractive to most members. Petitions are an easy way for chapters to become involved in campus political activity and also one of the best ways for us to allow JSAers to support causes in a meaningful way.

 

I will also work hard to improve our activism program. Our expansion program will naturally become more useful and effective with the expansion that will occur under my leadership. The director of activism will be directed to contact chapters via our internet infrastructure at times other than convention and, primarily through those internet infrastructure programs, we will create activism projects that are not limited to what we can do at convention and are more focused on substance than novelty. 

Program Two: Minicon Support

The minicon is a useful tool for the Junior State of America. I plan on promoting what I call expansion minicons. I will expand JSA using expansion minicons, planned and organized by willing chapter leadership and with as much assistance as I can provide, that will help explain the organization to students from schools that don’t yet have JSA chapters, to prospective new members or chapter founders, and also give a taste of what our actual conventions are like. After attending these expansion minicons, students not yet in JSA will become interested, and hopefully form new chapters and thus expand the organization.

 

A manual to putting on a minicon for prospective JSA members will be published. This manual will be distributed along with new materials about summer programs, JSA conventions, and associate handouts and slideshows that will form the basis of presentations for prospective members or chapter founders. These materials will be made available to all chapter presidents, making an expansion minicon easier to hold. 

 

In order to make these minicons easier to put on, the director of debate will be responsible for providing a series of still-relevant debate topics from previous conventions as well as some new topics and making them available on our website for chapter presidents trying to hold expansion minicons. These topics will only be useful for expansion minicons as they save work and give potential members and founders a sample of the kind of debate we normally do, rather than the usually more specialized topics found at minicons.

 

Chapters who want to hold a normal minicon involving a specialized set of debate topics will still be encouraged. Using our internet infrastructure program, we will make information on minicons more readily available to chapter president. I will also develop programs to encourage minicon participation. 

Program One: Expansion and Statehood

Southeast JSA has only been a territory for a few years. The state of Florida and its school-age population absolutely have the capacity to support a JSA state, but that hasn’t happened yet. I promise to lead Southeast JSA into statehood. While the title itself is basically symbolic, it symbolizes an increase in the number of chapters under the organization and also an increase in activity in those chapters. It is my firm belief that by working toward statehood we can greatly enhance Southeast JSA.

 

Central to the expansion program is the formation of new chapters. In order to form new chapters, I will write and make available a new guide that discusses not just starting a chapter, but helping students at nearby schools start chapters, a topic not discussed in the current guide. I am currently working with three other local schools as well as the district social studies coordinator on forming new chapters, and also have my chapter planning a minicon to introduce new potential members. I will draw on my experience in this area to give advice and leadership in the formation of new chapters.

 

A large number of JSA chapters are formed by students coming out of JSA summer school or otherwise learning about their organization on their own. I promise to support as much as in the past these embryonic chapters, I also promise to increase support to them through our new convention preparedness and minicon support programs.

 

We will also work on providing tools to chapter leadership at the school level to increase their membership. I am experienced with recruiting and the usage of multimedia tools that are helpful in recruiting and will concentrate on the expansion of chapters as well as the formation of new ones. Our activism increase projects will also help make JSA more visible on campus, thus increasing membership.

 

Platform Introduction

I am a candidate with a vision for the Junior State of America. The details of the vision are discussed in my five programs. You may not agree with all five, but the broader vision is something that we can all agree on: I believe that JSA needs to be made better, in every way. We can have more members, more attendance, we can build better debaters and moderators, and we can have more productive conventions. Philosophy tells us that the human form and the creations of the human form, such as JSA, cannot achieve perfection. But it is something we can strive for, and if elected governor, I promise to never stop striving for it.

 

I am the candidate who is best suited to instituting the kind of improvements we all want to see in JSA. I’m a leader and I’m a reformer. I’m also a hard worker who understands that an organization develops based on what its leadership and its membership put in to it. If you want to see reforms of any type instituted, I’m the best man for the job.

 

I am President of my school chapter. I took over the chapter because I was known to be a good leader and manager, not because of any great experience in JSA. But since I’ve taken over, we went from a chapter that was in slow decline after losing its founding membership to one that attends conventions, holds debate parties, recruits new members effectively, and forms other chapters.

 

If you ask anyone at my school about a club, they will probably direct your question to me. Besides being President of JSA, I’m also President of Model United Nations. Model UN lost our teacher advisor last year, but I reorganized the club based on my ideas and my chapter membership can attest that MUN is more prepared than ever before and more fun than ever before, feel free to ask our JSA membership, many of whom joined MUN for the first time after hearing how great it now is. I’m also one of if not the strongest player on our Scholar Bowl and Academic Worldquest teams, and bring my extensive knowledge of history and international affairs to the Governor’s office, a knowledge that will allow me to constantly draw on historical solutions for solutions to all types of problems.

 

Most of you who know me well probably associate me with the military. I plan on going into the Marines after attending Annapolis, and I’m a JROTC cadet, I’m a Cadet First Lieutenant, a Company Commander and Color Guard commander. Next year I will be the Battalion Commander, tasked with managing a very active battalion of nearly 200 cadets. Military leadership style, which is very dictatorial, does not work outside of military structures. I understand this, and will not treat JSAers like soldiers. Nevertheless, the basics of leadership are the same in any situation and my JROTC experience is a valuable one. I will bring my extensive leadership and management experience, of a type that no other candidate can bring, to the Governor’s office.

 

All of this talk of my leadership abilities begs the question of what I plan to lead you in to. This question will not go unanswered. If elected governor, I will institute a series of new programs designed to expand and improve the Southeast Territory of the Junior State of America. These programs will be supported through guides, instructional videos, and other methods as discussed in the program’s individual sections.

 

Elements of all of the programs are designed to enhance one another, in order to create a better JSA experience. Two programs, Expansion and Improvement (program one) and Convention Preparedness (program four) can be considered “goals” by themselves. These programs are both supported in some way by at least two other programs. All programs are supported by at least two other programs. The other three programs are not only supported by other programs but all support at least two other programs. For a breakdown of how this works, see the attached chart. The programs are also designed to stand effectively if they are implemented without any support from other programs, although they will be more effective as a group.