Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Wrapping it all up

This is my final blog post because as of today, kinda, my senior project is over! How sad!! Tomorrow is the giant relay, which Ms. Post and I have been tirelessly planning throughout  my project! I hope you all come and have an absolute BLAST!
So, to wrap up my final post I just wanted to tell you all what my suggestions are for the house system after 3 weeks of work, research and brainstorming! 
 My first and probably most important suggestion is to create more houses. With 4 houses with 100 people in each right now it is just too hard to organize and execute events that will engage or entertain the whole house. If there were 8 houses with about 50 kids in each house the meetings would improve, events would be more manageable and there would be less of a bystander effect on the house system as a whole. My next big suggestion, which relates to the last, is to have less leaders. There is an apparent bystander effect on the leaders and things just aren’t getting done. With one senior, one junior and one sophomore it would be a lot better. A single leader to rally the troops and excite the house, one junior to be in charge of organization and one sophomore apprentice would be best. My next suggestion would be to integrate a peer buddy system into the house. I would love to see this buddy system between juniors and freshmen so that the underclassmen had someone to look up to for more than just a single year. Also, juniors are more engaged in the school environment at the time the freshmen need help, whereas the seniors have developed senioritis. The buddies would serve as a guiding light to look up to, do a holiday gift exchange, help with scheduling and be a friend to the buddy. My next suggestion is that teachers should always be assigned to the same house and legacies should always be honored. These things create momentum for the house system and would make teachers and students more engaged. My next suggestion is to give students some choice in what house they end up in. I would love to see a survey attached to freshmen course registration that asks them which of the house service initiatives they are most interested in. My last suggestion is to have the House Leader elections at the same time as Senate elections. Right now house leaders appear to be lesser leaders than the Senators because people who lose Senate races very often run to be House Leaders. This stigma is very impactful and hurtful for the house system as a whole. Overall, I think the most important thing that needs to change is the engagement and enthusiasm of the leaders themselves. They are the heart and soul of the system. Their enthusiasm (or their lack of) has the ability to make or break the entire system.

THANKS MS. THOMPSON FOR ALL YOUR HELP ALONG THE WAY!

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