Last year if you roamed the halls of GA during a lunch period, you would come across classrooms filled to the brim with students bonding in affinity groups, learning sign language, or talking about mythological trivia. This year is understandably different for all aspects of school life— we are living through a pandemic after all— but clubs have been hit especially hard. Clubs are a place to make connections, which is especially important now since hybrid/virtual school makes it harder to see friends and make new ones. It’s time for the administrators to value club time as a vital part of our school.
Even before the pandemic, club meetings deserved more time. I never enjoyed having to inhale my sandwich in 10 minutes so I could participate in a discussion about feminism and then sometimes rushing to do lunch duty in the same period. Now, finding time to meet is even more of a challenge. At the time of writing this, the majority of clubs have met twice in the past three months of school. These meetings are only 25-30 minutes. SAGA student leader Rebecca Lee ‘21 says, “in a normal year, we would’ve met close to every other week”. Because lunch periods are so short, and it is unsafe to eat indoors, clubs have been allotted limited meeting times during flex periods when there isn’t a speaker or advisory activity.
In order to increase meeting time, many clubs have met outside of school. For example, Jason Wang ‘22 a leader of Asian Culture Club has hosted “two major events along with many planning meetings” online during the evening. In addition, The Edition meets on Friday and Monday nights every other week, and SAGA has started monthly Friday evening discussions as well. I am grateful that the clubs I participate in are active, but I know most people would rather we didn’t have to rely on meeting on school nights. Additionally, Club Med and Feminist Forum leader Sarah Fineman ‘21 explains that “it is difficult to plan meetings outside of school hours because everyone has different schedules.”
The few times that clubs have met, upperclassmen and lower classmen are split on Zoom and in-person. Ms. Graffman, a faculty leader of FemFo, explained that “it’s much harder to have substantive conversations when half the group is on Zoom and half are in the room” and that the “mentorship/role modeling” aspect between grade levels is lost a bit. FOCUS leader Brandon Giampalmi ‘21 echoes this, saying “our club is really based around in-person human interaction and discussion, which is hard to replace over zoom.” On the other hand, Ms. Burnett is “curious about the idea of completely virtual club meetings” so students could all be on the same platform instead of half in the classroom. BSA student leader Jess Moore ‘21 also shared that “Zoom allowed us to have a big turnout to our community discussion even though the event took place in August.” To me, it seems like Zoom is not the true problem, it’s the lack of club time provided during school hours.
As someone who participated in a fall sport, I’m grateful that GA tried so hard to give us our fall season. I do wish that similar effort could be made to keep clubs active. This is significant because some students find community in clubs instead of sports teams. Dr. Rabuck, faculty leader of Leland Society explains that “the mission of Leland is to provide an inclusive, judgement-free space for students whose interests are outside the mainstream, and that just isn’t happening this year.”
Although schedule making is difficult, there are a number of ways GA could make club meetings more possible. Sarah Fineman suggests potentially “providing more flex times to have club meetings.” Brandon Giampalmi adds, “if our lunch period was the length of a normal class, clubs could also use this time to meet.” Another helpful tool would be giving Zoom premium to student club leaders, allowing them to host meetings over the 40 minute time limit. Jason Wang says “Zoom premium would be cool for non-school time meetings because getting faculty members to join at night can be difficult” since they are busy. I think we could also give one period a week especially to clubs, like a permanent Wednesday flex time.
GA values civil discourse, and clubs provide a great place to practice this. GA values club participation and extracurriculars are an integral part of your college resume. GA values all that clubs provide, yet they do not give us the necessary time to actually engage in our clubs. GA needs to support these values by providing the one resource clubs really need: time.
We need Zoom premium!!!