Kailee Vick’s school district superintendent pointed out every place she could get shot from. Every angle a bullet would hit her. Just after February break during her senior year of high school in Rochester, Vick wanted to organize a walkout following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. It started with a meeting between her school’s administration and other peers, but school officials wanted instead to do a gym assembly.

Vick pushed even further. Vick’s mother made orange T-shirts for gun safety awareness. The superintendent was against the protest, though, according to Vick. She wanted to march around the school’s track, so school officials parked a bus there to block it off. Yet every time Vick encountered pushback, she found a way to persevere.

“They didn’t rip the shirts off our backs, we didn’t get shot, nothing terrible happened,” Vick said. “We went out for half an hour, we spoke our minds and advocated for what we believed in.”

Now, Vick and running mate Ryan Golden bring that same mindset to their campaign for Student Association vice president and president, respectively. The two want a larger voice for marginalized students as an avenue for activism to constructively bring change. Too often, Vick and Golden said, issues brought up by students are set aside.

There’s a need for change in the way Student Association operates, Vick said, and she and Golden are willing to lead it. Their campaign slogan is “A New Direction.”

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“Other campaigns are continuing a legacy that doesn’t exactly try to include everyone,” Vick said. “We are putting Syracuse University in a new direction by focusing on enabling and benefiting marginalized students and marginalized groups.”

Vick grew up with teenage parents in Alabama before she moved up and down the East Coast, eventually settling in Rochester when she was 12. Her middle school didn’t have student council, she said, and she experimented with it her first few years of high school. Her first “real” position was the student body president her senior year. That was when she organized the walkout toward the end of winter.

“People always ask me where I’m from, and I’m like, ‘Can’t I just say Haven (Hall)? Can’t I just say the Dome,” Vick said. “This is the first place that’s really felt like home.”

Vick is the only vice presidential candidate this election cycle who currently serves in SA, which she sees as an advantage because she knows how SA works.

Vick has spent her first year in SA as the director of relations with the Department of Public Safety. One of the primary concerns for her and Golden is a possible review of DPS. SU students and SA as an organization have called on the university to conduct a review of DPS’ bias and sensitivity training.

Last October, during a meeting of SA’s Diversity Affairs Committee, Vick met the future campaign manager for her and Golden’s campaign, Quincy Nolan. Nolan resigned from their position as co-chair of diversity affairs last week after criticizing an upcoming campus event as “queerphobic.” Nolan and Golden have said there was a lack of LGBTQ in the planning of “Cuse Can! It Starts With Us,” which will bring rapper Pusha T to campus for a concert.

Vick said she was the first person to come out as openly gay in her school when she was 12. Her senior year, she said people approached her and said that what she did in seventh grade meant so much for their “coming out journey.”

Published on April 3, 2019 at 12:05 am

Contact Andrew: arcrane@syr.edu | @CraneAndrew