Running ICS Student Council on a Budget of Zero

The student council at International Community School in Bangkok plans the banquet, the Valentine's event, and the Christmas event every year, and the school doesn't put a dollar toward any of it. On episode 123 of Students Incorporated, ICS Student Council President IQ and Vice President David, both seniors, walk through what it actually takes to run a full calendar of campus events on money the students raised themselves. The episode also carries part five of the show's serial mystery, "The Mystery of St. Augustine," titled "The Property."

The Budget Problem Nobody Sees

Planning for the banquet starts in September for an event that doesn't happen until April, and most of that lead time goes to logistics most students never think about: contacting vendors, comparing venues, dividing outreach across the executive committee. But the detail that reshapes everything else is money. ICS doesn't fund its student council, and as one of the two officers put it on the show:

I feel like we might be the only school where the school doesn't actually support the student council in terms of finance.

Every venue has to be chosen against what the council can realistically raise, not what it wants. Past fundraisers set the ceiling for future ones: a strong showing at ICS Got Talent, the school's talent-show fundraiser, becomes the reference point for what the next event's venue budget can afford. That constraint runs underneath everything else in the interview: the trust, the delegation, the division of labor all exist because there's no other way to pull off events at this scale with no institutional safety net.

Trust Versus Command

IQ and David lead differently, and they say so plainly. IQ describes trust as the operating principle: if a council member commits to a deadline, IQ takes that at face value and expects a heads-up if something changes rather than a missed deadline with no warning. David, by IQ's account, is "more of like the chill guy" in the group. IQ, in contrast, calls their own approach more "command oriented," stepping in directly when a member's work falls short of expectation, but doing it from what they describe as a calm, logical standpoint rather than an angry one. "I really don't like it when people... take out their anger on people in kind of a leadership scenario," IQ said.

Why They Ran Together

Their paths to the roles started from opposite places. IQ ran for president driven by what they called self-improvement, despite describing themselves as naturally introverted and not someone who speaks up often. David's path started years earlier, in ninth grade, running for class representative against doubts from peers who didn't think he was suited to it: not the highest grades, not the most visible student. That experience became his case for running for vice president later: leadership, he argued, is about trust and representation, not credentials.

They ran as a ticket on purpose. Their closeness, IQ said, is exactly why the partnership works rather than a liability: David will often start acting on something IQ wanted done without being asked, simply because the two already know how the other operates.

Closing the Gap Between Grades

Asked what advice they'd leave the next student council, both pointed to the same structural problem: a gap that tends to open up between ninth- and tenth-grade class representatives and the executive committee sitting above them in the council's hierarchy. This year's officers said they deliberately worked to narrow it, on the belief that student council works better when every level of it feels connected rather than layered.

They also pushed back on how the role gets perceived from outside. The assumption, one of them said, is that student council is made up of the most popular kids or the biggest personalities in the building. From the inside, they described it differently: ordinary people who also want the work to be fun, not just another task to check off.

What Comes Next

One of the two is headed to Chulalongkorn University to study economics, with an eye toward eventually starting a business and, someday, owning a restaurant. The other is bound for Yale University to study mechanical engineering, and expects the distance from friends back in Bangkok to be the real test of something the role taught them: that staying connected to people doesn't require being in the same place, as long as both sides keep trying.