It seems as though our school spirit is always faltering. Whether it's supporting our sports teams, attending our events, or participating during spirit weeks. Sophomore Joshua Bravo and several of his friends say it's an issue of awareness. Others like Freshman Giovanna Nieto believe it is an issue of quantity. Senior Joanna Mejia believes it's due to bland, repetitive spirit weeks.
This blog post is going to be a hefty one. I'll be addressing four issues: school spirit, transparency, communication, and ASB as a class.
SCHOOL SPIRIT
When it comes to organizing spirit weeks, it takes a great deal of effort from both ASB and the students. As ASB, we have to first brainstorm, then choose our spirit days, and lastly we have members design and paint posters which usually take about 2-3 days. In addition to this, once we get the news out students often say they don’t have certain clothing items for certain days. So what will I do differently?
What I propose is to have spirit days. These spirit days will be tied with holidays and small school events. What this does is it makes it easier for the student body, ASB included, to find the appropriate clothes for said spirit days. In addition to this, I will work with ASB and Mr. Voight to help incentivise our spirit days and spirit weeks.
After speaking with Joshua and several other students, it seems that they too don’t feel aware. Our Instagram is a great place to stay informed on what ASB is up to. Obviously, not every student is on the platform; however; I will work with Mr. Voight to improve his daily emails to include our news, so there won’t be an excuse to uninformed. Additionally, I will work with ASB to create attention grabbing posters and videos to promote our events.
In addition to spirit days/weeks, I also plan on working with Mr. Voight on developing a house like system similar to that of Harry Potter. What this will do is create groups of students from multiple grades. In hope, this will create a greater sense of community within our school.
TRANSPARENCY
Moving on, what exactly do I mean about transparency? When I say transparency, I specifically mean our numbers.
The loss we took for Winter Formal definitely rose some eyebrows. What I plan on doing is having a system where we document everything, and then present that data in the form of a report.
That this report will have is three topics: demographics (how many of each class went and how many out of the school total), spending, and earnings.
COMMUNICATION
Boxes have been placed in every classes for you guys to leave us concerns, complaints, and compliments; however, it wasn't used too often.
What I plan on doing is going paperless. By doing so, we won't have to check every classroom periodically. This would also make it easier for you guys to get to us, and it'll be easier for us to get back to you.
Additionally, I will have performance reports made for you to evaluate us, and to see how we can improve in general.
Also. I will have survey's made for our events to see what you liked and disliked.
ASB AS A CLASS
What I hope to do with ASB is for everyone to hold a position aside from "Member at Large."
Many of the positions in ASB require a lot of the students, so several of these will be split into two. By having everyone hold unique responsibilities, ASB as a whole will be more diverse in terms of skills and performance.
I will also work with ASB to make our decision making more inclusive. I'd do this by having frequent Instagram posts and the occasional Google Form for those who'd like to be part of the decision making.
Overall, I plan on working with the student body, ASB, and school staff to come up with creative solutions to help improve school spirit, transparency, communication, and ASB as a class.