First Meeting

The Student Advisory Committee (SAC) had our first meeting on September 18. There was some communication breakdown and a few of us arrived very very early at the MIAA Office in Franklin. Some of us (Mick) didn't arrive at all due to another communication breakdown. In any event, the meeting got started with a slideshow of pictures from all cameras from the NFHS trip so we could all laugh and talk a little bit about the trip before we got started. The first thing on the agenda was to elect the Chair and Vice Chair of the SAC. As a group, we elected in Nick and Nate as our Chair’s and Megan and Donald as our Vice Chairs. As Pete, one of our advisors, is on the NFHS board, one of his jobs is to give evaluations with out thoughts from the trip and try to incorporate what we wanted to change, so we held a discussion about what we would do differently. The basic thing that everyone would change is less time in the museum and less time at the community service project, or actually to have a community service project. Everyone enjoyed the speakers and the break out sessions.
The next thing on the agenda for us to discuss was the Wellness Summit. We were to have many responsibilities at the summit such as leading exhibitors to their tables, ushering all the participants to where they are supposed to be, managing time for the presenters during their workshops, and last but not least, we were to give a presentation of our own. We needed to plan out a 50 minute time slot to show what we do as an organization and do some leadership exercises. We opted to open our workshop with a slideshow of pictures from NFHS to get people interested in what we do. As people walk into the room, they would be handed a card from a deck of playing cards, to be used later. When everyone is settled in, we would do an introduction of what we do as student leaders and where we are all from. After that, we break everyone up by the suit of card they have. The SAC would divide themselves evenly to run the human knot game as an ice breaker. Once that is completed, we would have a set of discussion questions that the participants would use strongly agree, strongly disagree, agree and disagree. Once we finished talking about them in the groups, we would hold a big discussion and have people go to corners of the room where the signs that say disagree, agree, etc. are. If we had any time left, we would play a big game of paper scissors rock that we learned at NFHS.
Once our workshop was finalized, we began to discuss our community service project. We all liked the idea of helping out our communities by cleaning up parks and playgrounds, but we wanted to make a bigger difference. Some of us wanted to work with children by having a field day of games and activities for elementary school children. We had many good ideas but we haven’t nailed down an exact activity. We are also to take part in the Student of the Month Award judging process, which we are all very excited about. The last thing that we discussed was the possibility of hosting our own community service project as the SAC but also leading all of the student ambassadors from around the state in their own community service projects. We would like to have one central event, but also branch out to different regions of the state having their own. There is more to come on this idea as well.