Student Council learns leadership through planning activities.
Following all the excitement and pageantry of homecoming week, the student body is rudely greeted the following Monday with: “We now resume our regularly scheduled programming.” The routine of school can be a bit tedious, which is why decades ago, administrators realized the value of promoting student councils, who not only provide entertainment and a heavy dose of school spirit but also learn important leadership and problem solving skills.
And who’s leading the leaders?
(Student Council advisers Jackie Doering and Amy Anderson)
Maple River’s student council advisers are Jackie Doering, business teacher, and Amy Anderson, Middle School Social Worker. To pull off a week of homecoming activities, weeks of advance planning must happen first. At one of the final meetings prior to homecoming, it became obvious how the two advisers balance their duties. As Amy Anderson took the group of twenty students from four grade levels through the agenda, Jackie Doering observed it all from a distance, putting out fires as problems popped up during the meeting. Even though the advisers modeled how to run an organization, they let the students make the decisions. “When we agreed to take over,” Amy Anderson explained, “we both felt very strongly about this being their student council. We don't make the decisions. We provide guidance, we provide ideas, we provide the fence so that we say, ‘no, no, that's not going to work,’ but we just both really were in agreement that we want them to make their own decisions and to decide their activities. We've been through high school once already. This isn't for us, right? And so we've put a lot of the leadership back on our seniors that they, you know, are keeping the minutes, and they're talking through the meetings, and they're holding everybody accountable and and we're not chasing everyone, because for both of us, we we have a lot on our plates outside of student council. And so we said ‘it needs to be you, and if you are going to be student government, then you need to take the ownership of student government.’ And they really have stepped up, and they make those decisions, and they're learning what leadership feels like, sometimes good, sometimes not so great.”
(The senior Student Council officers)
This year, the four seniors leading the student council are Kelsey Jaeger, Gavin Halvorson, Olivia Anderson, and Maia Garbes. “We've had at least, at least one meeting a week, if two, to plan all the homecoming activities and everything,” Gavin Halvorson, in his second year, explained about the amount of time it takes to pull off an event. For Olivia Anderson, she’s had three previous years of watching others lead prior to taking charge as a senior, yet she also understands how hard it is to please everybody. “I feel like a lot of people will talk and complain about it, but I'm like, ‘Well, if I want something done, then I want to do it.’ I'm a doer, and I'm gonna get it done. I would rather be the one planning and organizing it and I know that it gets done, right?”
For “rookies” Jaeger and Garbes, they chose to join rather than simply complain about the decisions made so that “senior year would be a good year.” Gavin Halvorson sees an activity like homecoming as an important tradition to uphold, which is why he joined. “I would say it's probably more so just me wanting to make a difference, or trying to make the school happier, or seem happier and more fun. Because school may not be the most fun thing at times, but the activities we get to play, we get to make it more fun.”
Each spring, the student council advisers seek nominations from the student body to have four people from each grade level represent the class at these meetings. Staying in student council, like a real politician, means you must earn the trust of your classmates to return. Even though these four seniors were voted on by their peers, they must walk the fine line between being a people-pleaser and doing what’s best for the whole student body. “The class doesn't understand how much work it is,” Olivia Anderson added. “And they'll be like, ‘well, actually, I wanted to do this.’ And it was like, ‘Well, we made that decision two months ago, and we can't really change it now.’ They don't understand all the work that goes into it, so it's really easy for them to critique.” So what do these officers get out of the experience?
Planning skills, time management skills, being able to talk to different people, and critical
thinking skills were almost simultaneously listed by the four members.
While homecoming is the lead-off activity for the 20-member team, it is certainly not the last activity of the year. For Jackie Doering, she feels the debriefing following an activity is where the most learning happens. “We'll ask ‘What did you hear from your classmates?’ Because they represent their whole grade. We keep that in mind for them. It's not just your ideas, like you need to ask others, and we just kind of do a brain dump. We'll go through our schedule, and then we also ask teachers from our standpoint. We don't need it to be too crazy for teachers. But also, it's homecoming week, and it can be kind of fun and different, so we try to make sure you have a good balance of that. And then kids say, ‘we loved this’ or ‘we didn't like this,’ and make note of it for next year.”
After a trial by fire early in the year, the student council gets to try again with several activities. The Veterans Day ceremony, a Snow Week around Christmas time, a few dances, and a blood drive in February give the members a chance to evaluate and learn from their earlier experiences. Thanks to the hard work of the advisers and student council members, homecoming is a constant evaluation of old traditions and new ideas to try to give students something to remember rather than the grade on the last math quiz.
(Below: from dress up days to coronation, the twenty members of student council bring the entire homecoming week to life.)
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