For the 2023/24 school year, the Westminster Middle School offers two more leadership opportunities: the Green Council and the Visual Arts Council. They both strive to create a space for students to work together to achieve the groups’ respective goals.
The Green Council evolved from the Green Club, which Middle School teachers Jennifer Hogan and Clark Meyer started last year after students expressed interest in green-related topics through presentations in their elective classes and a Paw Prints article. The Green Council provides students with somewhere to continue their interest in the environment. “[I want to] have a place where students can gather and further explore environmental issues . . . and come up with initiatives and ways they can bring it to a larger awareness,” Hogan says.
As a larger, long-term goal, the council wants to address the shortcomings of recycling at Westminster. Hogan believes that the daunting task will take some investigation first, however. “It’s a very complex issue, and something that we are starting with is trying to figure out what the obstacles are, what are the roadblocks that inhibit it from happening,” she says. “It’s a multifaceted problem where nobody is quite sure what’s happening or why it’s not happening, and then there are assumptions in place, so it leads to a certain apathy. We don’t know what the real story is . . . our Green Council members [will] try to follow the trash.”
And even though it’s only been a few weeks, the students are already hard at work on solving the recycling issue. “We have been trying to get Westminster to meet with us,” 8th-grade member Mary Adelaide Gump says. “So far they’ve been kind of picky, but we’ll get them.”
Overall, the Green Council is starting off strong and developing lasting goals to make Westminster greener. “We have brainstormed what we want to do in the next couple months and couple years . . . We’ve been coming up with a bunch of ideas thinking about how Westminster could be more eco-friendly, etc,” Gump says.
The Visual Arts Council is the second of this year’s new councils. Middle School teachers Lauri Jones and Cybil Sather created it after noticing that many students were forced to choose between art and another elective, such as orchestra and drama. They didn’t want electives to get in the way of these students’ love for art. “The council is . . . an opportunity for students that had to make an elective choice to still be engaged in visual arts,” Jones says.
The council still appeals to students who do take visual arts in school, too, however. 7th grader Izzie Hoyos loves art and wanted to do art beyond the classroom environment. “I thought it’d be really fun to do art outside of art class,” she says.
A larger, overarching goal for the council is simply to make art a more significant part of Westminster and the city. “Our mission is to further our presence in the community . . . and also to inspire others, so we’re partnering with an organization and school called the Ansley School, [a tuition-free private school for children experiencing homelessness],” Sather says. “We’ll be making products to sell at the alternative gift fair, and hopefully, we will also inspire our school by adding some artwork to the building,”
As a new council, not as many students applied for the Visual Arts Council as opposed to some older ones, like the Community and Chapel Council. Jones and Sather see their smaller group of about twelve students as a good thing, however, as it allows them to take everyone on service-related field trips.
“Mrs. Sather and I really were committed to this service piece, which will require us leaving campus,” Jones says.
The project also excites students, along with the prospect of helping those at the Ansley school. Hoyos says she is looking forward to “going on field trips to see the kids.”