As institutions strive to improve teaching and learning for all, educators must consider equitable instruction. This includes equitable distributions of authority and agency among students. The authors define distribution of authority as shared opportunities for decision-making in enacting mathematical tasks and agency as the power to carry out these self-made decisions. Equitable distributions of authority and agency can be enhanced in mathematics public sensemaking classrooms where students participate in discourse as active members of the classroom. In public sensemaking classrooms, students understand and acknowledge one another's ideas, present and revise arguments, and take risks by sharing ideas. This study investigates one group of students and how they positioned one another during mathematical groupwork in a public sensemaking classroom as well as how the positioning impacted the distribution of agency and authority. At the time of data collection, the students attended a school for grades 6-12 situated in an urban public school that focuses largely on preparing students for careers in the health sciences and other health-related fields. Data was collected as video footage and analyzed using a priori codes. Analyses indicate that one student replicates the role of teacher by redistributing authority and agency back to other students through self-removal. This is contrasted with other motivations for self-removal while doing mathematics in a team. The findings inform researchers and classroom teachers of potential metacognitive awareness of equity between students, positioning patterns that may occur during collaborative groupwork, and the effectiveness of public sensemaking classrooms on distributing authority and agency equitably during groupwork.