Guest Speakers

We scheduled two different guest speakers for the event. The first speaker, Sarah Payne, a local entrepreneur, non-profit worker,  and former candidate for mayor of Auburn, talked to our students about how failure is a good thing. She spoke about her campaign and how learning from challenges can build us into successful leaders. She gave each student a glow stick and discussed how the glow stick doesn’t reach its full potential until it is broken; just like those glow sticks, we cannot reach our full potential until we have learned from failures in life. Some of our students already knew Sarah through her children and the impact she has made in the community, but all of them listened and were impacted by her advice.

Our second speaker was one of our school guidance counselors, Mrs. Troyer; in recent years, she has taken a leadership role within the school when it comes to climate and culture, serving on a committee and planning weekly activities for students. She talked about school culture with the students and helped them to brainstorm ways they can build a positive school culture. Students then decorated their own quilt piece representing their ideal school culture. We then attached each quilt piece to create one quilt for their vision of the culture for the school year. Throughout this school year, we have referenced this lesson many times to reinforce the values of positive leadership that we wish to instill in our student government officers. 

Team Building Activities 

Many of our leaders are from different social groups and partake in various extracurriculars. While some have pre-existing relationships outside of or within our organization, we wanted to make sure we did some team-building activities to strengthen their relationships. These activities included building a plastic cup tower without touching the cups, crossing the electric fence where students had to maneuver over or under a “fence” while staying connected to each other with a ribbon, and our favorite activity, Compliment Drive-Bys (thank you to Carrie Wisehart for sharing this amazing activity with us). During this activity, students are given strips of masking tape on which they write compliments for others. As they walk by each other, they stick the compliments to their backs. When the timer goes off, students remove their compliments and read through them. All of this feedback is anonymous for the most part. Many students choose to put their compliments directly onto their Chromebooks or a piece of paper so that they can look back on them. Everyone walks away feeling great about themselves at the end of this activity; we definitely recommend doing this multiple times throughout the year to increase positivity, and teachers and club sponsors can definitely partake in it as well. 

Event Planning 

Our organization is in charge of several activities and events throughout the year.  We designated a portion of our event to planning time for these events.  We broke the students into groups according to grade level and assigned each of them an event to begin planning.  A large amount of planning for homecoming, prom, Snowcoming, and our canstruction planning, an event in which we participate in, was completed during this time. We kept students off of their devices to ensure that they would continue to collaborate. After the event, we digitized their work so that we could keep track of it when it was needed. 

Service Project 

During breaks and lunch time, students assembled “Teacher Survival Kits” for our staff. These kits included lip balm, mints, chocolate, Emergen-C, stain-removing wipes, and Crystal Light packets. Every staff member in our building received one of these kits on the first day of school. In addition to wanting to create positive relationships between the students in our organization, we also wanted to demonstrate our goodwill to the teachers and other school staff. 

Lunch

Of course, we had to have lunch, so we catered Subway for our students. This is a great time for sponsors to mingle with the students. We also had our principal, associate principals, superintendent, and assistant superintendent join us for lunch. This gave the students and administration an opportunity to talk in a low-stakes, stress-free environment. Students were able to discuss and give their opinions on new school policies and procedures. Administrators reinforced the importance of student leadership within the building. 

Elections 

At the end of the event, we had elections for president and vice president of each class. Students interested in running for the position gave a short “Statement of Leadership” speech to their classmates. Each class voted for who they wanted to lead their class after getting to see their leadership skills in action throughout the day and listening to their statement. 

All in all, it was a great day! The kids had a lot of fun and were able to bond before the school year started. They walked into the school year inspired and ready to be leaders.