This year, North hosted its very first Club Week, which was held from Aug. 25 to 28. This new initiative serves as a part of North’s larger goal of maximizing student engagement in clubs and organizations.
“Club week is an opportunity for us to market and advertise to students and families and staff all of our things that go on in activities, whether it’s our offerings of clubs and organizations, the fun things that they do. Because ultimately, we want each and every student in our building to feel like they can belong somewhere, and half of that is just knowing what offerings we have available,” said Assistant Principal of Student Life Rebecca LaPorta.
LaPorta and Assistant Director for Student Activities Erin Manheim collaborated on this project over the summer.
“If you get [club promotion] in the very beginning of the school year, more kids will be able to get involved. And there’s so much research about how if kids are involved in clubs, they’re more likely to be successful in school,” said Manheim. ”This summer, we decided to create what we were calling Club Week, so that we can have multiple days with different types of ways for clubs to be highlighted.”
Club Week featured a variety of activities, each focusing on spreading awareness of North’s many clubs. There were raffles for students already in clubs, as well as marketing videos, posters in the hallways, people speaking during lunch in the cafeteria and the pod-decorating event, Plaster the Pods. For Plaster the Pods, clubs worked together to decorate the pods of classrooms around North with decor specific to their club, such as the French-themed posters put up by French Honor Society.
“Our advisors were excited to be able to showcase all the great things that the kids are doing around the school. I think one of our primary goals is just to talk more about activities, and really highlight that it can be competitive or social or interest based, and so I know that our advisors are excited to just get more kids and families talking about activities in general,” said LaPorta.
LaPorta and Manheim recognize the importance of highlighting the many niche clubs and activities at North. With 68 total clubs, it can be hard to advertise every one of those clubs to students.
“We always say that representation matters, and sometimes you don’t even know what clubs we have. Athletics has a lot of exposure for stuff in the community and in our school, and we’re really trying to make sure that we have just as much exposure as they do,” said Manheim.
LaPorta and Manheim are already in talks of bringing back Club Week next year, with a couple modifications, like determining a Club Week date earlier in the year and doing week-long raffles and video announcements to ensure it runs smoothly and maximizes student interest in clubs and activities.
“In May, we’ll know what week it is for the fall, and clubs can sign up at the end of school so they have a lot more time,” said Manheim. “We might try and do raffles all week long too, like we did it [once] but we could even do it all week. We could have video announcements all week, there’s a lot of things that we talked about for next year.”
Ultimately, as LaPorta emphasizes, getting students aware of and interested in the opportunities available to them is the most important part.
“It would be great to just have students know that we have such a variety of clubs and organizations that they should just go to our activity catalog and peruse through it. A lot of our clubs you can join at any time, and so don’t be afraid that in December, you can join something. Every single year we start new clubs too,” said LaPorta. “There’s always opportunity for new things.”
