The ability to start a club hear at ADM High School came about last year. Since then new clubs have appeared with a large variety to choose from, whether you want to sit back with your friends and play DND, show your love for the French language and culture in a French club, or if you want to get a little creative and learn a new skill in Crotchet and Knitting club. The surge of new clubs didn’t just begin last year, as there have been many new additions this year as well. How does one start a new club? How do people feel inspired to create new clubs? How do old clubs feel about this new uprise of clubs?
Ms.Bedard was the teacher who kickstarted this rise of clubs and can help students, or even teachers, start clubs. Ms.Bedard says that all a student needs to do to start a club is find a sponsor and an idea. Any staff in the building can be a sponsor who would be willing to start a club. If a student is having trouble finding a sponsor they can email Ms.Bedard and she will help them. After finding a sponsor you will visit Mr.Webers in the activities office to fill out a little paperwork and then get it approved by Mr.Grebal in the office and turn it in. Then it comes down to keeping the club running through sponsors and attendance. Ms.Bedard tells how she feels about the rise of new clubs, “Im very amazed, my heart is full as I think about all the kids who come to school and there are kids who have sports and there are kids who have fine arts, and there are kids who don’t have anything cause they aren’t interested in either. Trying to build clubs for passions that kids do have that don’t have another place at school is super beautiful to see that we can have a creative writing club where kids can just write or that we can have crochet and knitting or we can have DND club, that’s one of the biggest clubs now. I think student interest sparking into clubs is the best way to foster those passions. It makes my teacher’s heart happy.” Ms. Bedard also shares how there was a point where she felt overwhelmed by the number of students interested in clubs, “Looking at the list, my spreadsheet went on for ages about student interests and I organized it by students who said similar things. It was just a lot. It was not a bad thing, it was just overwhelming in the sense that there are a lot of things that people are passionate about in this building and I don’t think we know that as people one to one. You don’t know the person next to you has the same interest as you do, so it’s cool to see all of that Data. I also thought it was cool to see what teachers had passions for. There’s a lot on that data sheet that there are no clubs for right now, but a lot of people are interested in. There are things to work with there that I’m looking into.”
One of the founders of the Creative Writing club, Julia Logue, explains why she started the club, “Ever since I was little I always loved creating pieces of writing and I overheard Ms.Bedard saying that a Creative Writing club could be fun, and so I thought that because I love writing and I’m in a creative writing class so the combo of those made my think it could be something that would be enjoyable to do.” She also tells us how she started a club, “It was pretty easy to start a club, my other leadership member, Liz Dirksen, Ms.Bedard, and I would educationally during lunch breaks and talk about what we want to do for this club and once we had everything all planned out and talked to a guy in the activity office who gave us permission to start this club.” Julia also gives some insight on how they planned meetings and when they were going to be, “We decided to have two meetings every month, one during power hour and one after school on Fridays. We decided on these days because we thought that’s what would work best for the most people.”
Chloe Meacham is one of the presidents of the Crochet and Knitting Club. She explains how she feels about all of these new clubs as a person running one of the older clubs, “I’m really glad that new clubs are being formed. I’m glad there are more spaces for people to go, especially the creative ones like creative writing club and art club.” Chloe also shares how the new clubs have impacted the Crochet and Knitting club, “people did stop showing up to Crochet and Knitting club, I’m a little salty. I think people went to the Crochet and Knitting club because they didn’t have anything to do especially on Fridays, we lost a lot of people to the art club. Other clubs don’t interfere much with crotchet and knitting club schedule as much as it interferes with other activities like speech.” Chloe Meacham and McKinley Cornwell did not have a hard transition to power after the presidents, and half the members, graduated. They feel that it’s fun to create activities outside of school like the baby hat program and be able to do more for the club.
Starting a club is relatively easy. People believe that it is a great thing that students can be so passionate about something and can have somewhere to go, even if that means the attendance lowers in a different club.