Ryan Fox and Brittany Kleinschmidt have been elected Student Body President and Vice President, respectively, for the 2018-19 academic year.

The results were announced on Thursday, March 29 in the Heritage Room of the Oakland Center, with Fox and Kleinschmidt receiving 457 votes.

They were officially sworn into office by their predecessors during a Student Congress meeting on Monday, April 2.

“Ryan has been a wonderful asset to our Student Congress team,” said current Student Body President Lena Mishack. “He is passionate about OU and seeks the best possible experience for all students on our campus. OUSC is in great hands next year.”

Fox currently serves as the legislative affairs director for Student Congress, while Kleinschmidt is the current student services director. Next year, they will serve alongside newly elected legislators Austin Church, Tyler Fox, Stephanie Hubbard, Sylvia Kashat, Tyler Parsons, Joseph Petrik, Elijah Sanders, Richard Seeger, Mina Wassef, Hunter Willis and Ronald Yousif.

“In my role, I plan to guide the legislature through all of their initiatives as well as pursue the ones Ryan and I have taken charge of,” Kleinschmidt said.

Fox and Kleinschmidt’s platform addressed “frustrations” they have experienced during their time at OU in areas such as financial aid, food, accessibility and student employee rights. Though they weren’t anticipating a victory, Fox said their plan to address these issues during their term may have helped them win over students.

“We touched into these issues, which a lot of people just had never talked about before,” he said. “A lot of students had this idea of just, ‘Oh, well, that’s how Financial Aid works,’ but we stood up and we said, ‘Well, it doesn’t have to work that way.’”

That doesn’t mean their jobs will be any easier, though. Fox expressed concerns that the school administration, which has been “less responsive” to OUSC in recent months, might be “trying to stifle communication” with student representatives.

“I hope, personally, to show administration that Brittany and I are people to be reckoned with, and that students here—and the student representatives—deserve respect, and demand respect, quite frankly,” he said. “So, I guess my fear there is that the administration might be not as receptive to our ideas as the students are.”

However, Mishack said Fox’s enthusiasm and willingness to encourage other students’ political involvement has made him her ideal successor.

“He has grown so much this year as a leader and continuously advocates on important issues to students,” she said. “He organized an entire conference this fall for all of Michigan’s public universities and it was honestly one of the most well done conferences I’ve been to. Over the years, he has gotten hundreds upon hundreds of students registered to vote. Ryan, our Vice President, and I have worked closely on the state funding movement this year, so I am confident he will pick things up right where we leave off.”

As far as Fox is concerned, his and Kleinschmidt’s administration plan to achieve exactly what their campaign platform promised.

“I’ve always said, ‘you aim for the moon, because if you miss, you might hit a star,’” he said. “So, we’re setting our goals as high as we possibly can.”