DLA puts on fifth annual Unity week

Serena Bettis • March 30, 2017

According to Merriam-Webster, the word unity means “a way of combining the parts in a work of art or literature so that they seem to belong together.” When all the different parts of something are brought together, they become unified, despite still being their own distinct thing. Every year at Fossil Ridge High School, members from Diverse Leadership Awareness (DLA), led by counselor Melissa Vasa, try to show this idea to students through Diversity Day, which is held in September, and Unity Week, which happens around the first week of April. Junior Milena Brown said, “[We have Diversity Day] to emphasize our differences, but in a good way. It’s to highlight the strength in diversity. Unity Day is saying ‘okay, let’s take all of our differences, all of our different strengths, and when we come together we can make something really great’.”

Unity Week came about after the school’s 2012 Lip Dub, when, according to Vasa, “We realized the power of community.” This year’s Unity Week will take place April 3-6, and is centered about the Dude. Be Nice project, which was founded by Brent Camalich. The DBN project is focused on kindness and an appreciation for everyone in the community, and DLA will be incorporating aspects of the project into their activities throughout the week. The main event will take place, as usual, during advisory, with a group lesson plan and then activities for the whole school in the gym. This year, however, that will be happening at the start of the week, Monday, April 3, because school will not be in session on Friday, April 7.

The incorporation of the DBN project into Unity Week will be very different from past years, and DLA members are excited to kick it off and create a fun week of bringing the school together. “The best part about this year’s week is that it’s much more involved with the student body and there’s a lot more opportunities for students and staff to participate in activities throughout the week. What I really love about the way that we’ve been doing is that we’ve been reaching out to so many organizations within the school. We’re unifying a lot of different clubs in order to put it on,” said Brown.

Students who wish to help lead the activities during advisory on Monday can contact a DLA member or Vasa, and DLA is also looking for as much student involvement as possible throughout the rest of the week. “What you get out of high school is what you put into it, and what you put into it is also related to the events that you go to. People can get involved, meet new people, and just have a lot of fun,” said Brown.

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Cover Photo Credit: dudebenice.com

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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.