Imagine Hackley without exam destressing activities, movie nights, and spirit weeks. Although their impact may often go unnoticed, Community Council is responsible for creating and executing the events the Hackley community knows and loves. Without Council, community gathering activities would vanish, leading to a less wholesome community.
Some students complain about Community Council, but others do recognize their work. Senior student Leila Dillow is on the Hackley Girls Varsity Soccer and Varsity Lacrosse team. She is not on the student council, although she takes part in the council’s organized activities, such as prom.
“I think that the Student Council is productive. I think there’s a lot of stuff that they’re in charge of organizing. For example, we can see that the ninth graders are having a pizza party, which was organized by the Student Council. I think Council has a lot of responsibilities when it comes to the activities within the grade,” Leila said.
Although Leila thinks the Council is productive and does a lot for the community, she feels the activities organized by the Council could be more curated to a high school demographic, because they can often be immature.
“They could make things more fun. It’s like, why are we doing an activity night or movie night and watching Shrek when everyone is like seventeen and eighteen or fifteen and sixteen? That’s just not going to appeal to anybody,” Leila said.
Upper School math teacher, Jon Gruenberg, has been coordinating Council for 13 years at Hackley.
According to Mr. Gruenberg, the goal of Community Council is to uphold and promote the mission statement of Hackley. Both in and outside the classroom, members of Council try to be role models for their peers. As leaders, they try to live out Hackley’s core values.
“I think of the role of Council as students who are there to represent their grade and to bring ideas about ways to enhance and improve student life within the existing structure of what we have the power to do as Council,” said Mr. Gruenberg.
Community Council members meet every Monday at 7:00 p.m. to plan events, talk about their goals moving forward, and reflect on previous events. Everyone in the Council meets, and then they break out into grades to organize.
“We try to meet every week, and I think either within the meeting or from meeting to meeting, what we do, sort of, some of the time is all of Council, and then sometimes for grades to break out and just do their individual grade level meetings. But then they bring it back to the group and say, ‘here’s what we’re working on,’” Mr. Gruenberg said.
One of the most challenging aspects of Community Council is trying to schedule events that work for everyone. Everyone at Hackley has different after-school activities, whether that be participating in sports, plays, or musical performances. Because of this, not everyone can participate in Council’s events.
“One of the things we’ve run into is, imagine if you live in the city or in New Jersey, it’s an hour home, it’s an hour back, and getting people back is difficult, or people go home, they have every intention of coming back to school. It’s tough to get people back on campus. And it’s tough to get people to come to something right after school because of sports and extracurriculars,” Mr. Gruenberg said.
Community Council events take weeks and even months to plan, so being pre-prepared is key in order to successfully follow through with an organized event.
“I think sometimes the students will have great ideas or they have great ideas at the last minute and because the student body here is so busy, I don’t want to say it’s last minute, it’s that there’s thought about an activity that they want to do, but we’ve put in place the last few years that you have to turn in forms, like more than two weeks in advance. I think some pre-planning is something that we could do better,” Mr. Gruenberg said.
An important part of the Council is to get the opinion of the student body and adjust events to the wants of the students.
“I think getting student input is something that we do well and something that we could improve on. At some point, you just have to say, ‘we can’t build an event that’s going to work perfectly for everybody,’ let’s just build a good event,” said Cornelia.
The impact that the Council has goes unnoticed by students. Council wants to provide shared experiences and events for students to attend.
“If you didn’t have Council, you would just lose a lot of those little events. Everything isn’t for everyone, but we make it available to everyone. It’s nice to know that people are trying to provide opportunities to come together and have shared experiences,” Mr. Gruenberg said.
Sophomore student Cornelia Gruenberg is an elected member of the Council and was on the Council in eighth grade as well as ninth grade. She said that one of the main goals Council has is to be efficient when planning and executing events.
“I feel like this year we have been actually pretty productive with planning events and figuring out what we’re trying to do. It’s a little hard right now to figure out what we want to do because we’ve hit a block with what we want to try to do this winter, because a dance last year wasn’t as successful. We’re actually putting ourselves out there with what we want and advertising Community Council much better than last year,” said Cornelia.
Although Cornelia said Council has been efficient in planning events, there is always something to work on when it comes to the Council.
“I think we could work on, when we’re in that fun meeting space, it’s basically like a big discussion style, which is how we end up just talking in circles for a whole hour,” Cornelia said.
A common way to get over a roadblock is to return to the overriding intention and purpose the Council has to serve. Community Council has been and will continue to serve as the backbone of the student body in voicing the wants and needs of students.
“Our job is to advocate for the students and to really go back to the school for, like, what they want and to show the school, ‘oh, the students want this or more of that.’ And to try and actually advocate for the students and what they actually want,” Cornelia said.