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 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.

ICS may not be quite as alone in this as it feels from the inside. Reporting on school funding elsewhere has found that a large share of student clubs and activities, roughly 80 percent by one estimate in the United States, don't qualify for official school funding at all and have to raise their own money, a pattern that's grown more common as inflation and tighter education budgets push extracurriculars further down the list of what gets paid for centrally. It doesn't make the ICS council's situation less demanding. It does mean the skill IQ and David are describing, running a real budget with no guaranteed backstop, is becoming a more common part of student leadership than it might look like from one campus.

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.

That split between the two roles maps onto a distinction leadership researchers have studied closely: command-and-control leadership, built around position and rapid execution, against trust-based leadership, built around giving people latitude and expecting them to meet it. Neither approach wins outright in the research. Harvard Business School surveys have found the large majority of executives still believe command-and-control has its place, particularly in crises or when something needs to move fast, while separate studies tie trust-based leadership to higher engagement, creativity, and retention over time. The leaders who test best overall aren't purely one or the other; researchers have found leaders who can flex between styles depending on the situation perform roughly 45 percent better than those locked into a single mode. IQ and David, running as a ticket rather than as a single president, effectively built that flexibility into the role by splitting it across two people instead of asking one person to hold both instincts at once.

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.

What the two of them are describing lines up with what education researchers have found about student government more broadly. Studies on student council participation consistently link the role to measurable gains in assertiveness, self-reliance, organization, and problem-solving, and some research frames student government as the most explicit form of leadership training available inside a typical high school, since it hands students real organizational and financial responsibility rather than a simulation of it. Researchers are careful to note the usual caveat, that students who are already inclined toward leadership may simply be more likely to run in the first place, but the skills IQ and David describe practicing under real financial constraint (negotiating with vendors, dividing labor, absorbing responsibility when something falls through) match closely with what the research identifies as the activity's actual value.

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.

That specific failure mode shows up constantly in adult organizations too, which is part of why it's worth taking seriously in a student council. Workplace surveys have found that managers sitting between senior leadership and frontline staff are consistently the weakest link in organizational communication, with nearly nine in ten middle managers saying clear, timely information from the top is essential to their job, while barely more than half feel they actually get it. A separate large-scale Gallup study of managers found only about a third were genuinely engaged in their roles, with roughly one in seven actively disengaged. A council that closes the gap between its youngest representatives and its executive committee is solving, in miniature, the same problem that costs adult organizations real productivity every year.

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. Chula has held the top spot among Thai universities in the QS World Rankings for 17 consecutive years and places in the world's top 100 for academic reputation, making it the country's most competitive in-market option for a student who could plausibly have looked abroad. 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.

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