Take action with the Culture Team

Serena Bettis • February 26, 2016

IMG_20160226_140605 — A STUCO rep presenting to students.

On Wednesday, February 17, a large group of students gathered in the PAC to hear members from Fossil Ridge High School’s Climate and Culture Team talk about the ideas they have formed over the past few months. This action meeting helped spread the word about the Culture Team and allowed more students to learn about the events the members are planning.

A STUCO representative kicked off the meeting by introducing the general purpose of the team and how it formed. Other members then presented on their specific ideas and the committees surrounding those ideas, including one for marketing the events the Culture Team organizes. There is also a group for Unity Week, Appreciation Week, and the Ridge Games. After the meeting, students signed up for the groups they wanted to help with and enjoyed a complimentary breakfast.

These groups are about creating school-wide activities that any student can participate in, aimed to make everyone feel included. Appreciation Week is meant to challenge students to go out of their way to make someone else’s day better and find some new friends, too, and the Ridge Games will allow for students to bond while having fun and completing challenges around the school.

Culture is an important part of everyone’s lives and the school environment, and it was good for Culture Team members to see more students interested in cultivating the school’s culture. “I thought it was about drama club,” said Grant DeLuca, “but I still signed up for Ridge Games.” Despite the fact that theatre students only originally went to the meeting because they were told it for important for drama club, many found the ideas intriguing and decided to participate with the events.

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The ideas the Culture Team has are still in a planning stage, which is why members really want to get more students to go to meetings. Nic Rhodes said, “I thought the ideas were very helpful for people who really care about them.” However, having a meeting during late start when most students prefer to sleep in or finish homework might not have been the best choice. “If we can show the ideas to more of the school at a time when more people can still them, then I think more people will be involved,” said Rhodes.

The next meeting is on Thursday, March 10, after school in the Media Center, and all students who have the slightest interest are welcome to attend.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.