Leadership Department plans to have a greater impact on campus

On September 11, all leadership groups came together as a team and attended a training day, marking the beginning of the new leadership program. Starting this year, ASB, Link Crew, PLUS, Service Learning and the Principal’s Advisory Council plan to work collaboratively in order to make a significant impact on campus, focusing specifically on unity and inclusion.

Last year, many of these programs were new to our school and functioned as separate entities, leading to confusion and ineffectiveness. Each group worked toward their own specific goals, not focusing on their ultimate common goal. This led to a scattered and futile showing on campus. However, this year the leadership department has a plan to solve these problems.

During the leadership training day, students learned about the different roles of each leadership group and how they would support each other to make the campus a better place. They also learned about critical issues and how to deal with those that exist on campus, and participated in several team-building activities.

“This year, we plan to educate all leadership students to avoid the confusion of roles from last year,” PLUS teacher Christine Lopez said. “The big thing is to support one another.”

Each organization has a different but equally important part to play. This division of responsibility will allow the groups to collectively have a larger impact. Whereas PLUS deals with social and critical issues, the role of ASB is to keep up school and overall run student activities on campus. The Principal’s Advisory Council is Principal Mitzi Cress’s ears on campus; members keep her informed on what is happening with student life at Pen. Link Crew works to integrate freshmen and transfer students into high school, and the newest class, Service Learning, takes action against problems at school and on a larger scale in the community.

“Link Crew will help achieve the common goal of inclusion by making every freshman and transfer student feel included,” junior Sarah Schoettler said.

Although the Service Learning class is just getting off the ground, it also plans to have a strong impact on campus.

“In Service Learning, we discuss problems that we have not only on campus, but also in the world,” senior Sherry Liu said.

The new and improved leadership department hopes to lead the way to a more unified Panther family. With these five classes working at the same goal, student leadership should have a much larger presence on campus.