Leadership is gradually implementing a program at Aragon called Raising Student Voice and Participation (RSVP). Through this campaign, Leadership ultimately intends to increase diversity of opinion by getting every student’s voice heard as part of a built-in plan for identifying issues on campus, sharing ideas for improvement, and narrowing these issues and ideas down so that Leadership and the Aragon community can then focus on addressing these most important topics.
This school year, Leadership is starting the program’s implementation with the introduction of Town Hall Meetings, intended to replace Grand Student Council Meetings and increase diversity of student opinion for improvement of the school.
Twice per semester, a Town Hall Meeting for each of the four grades will occur during fifth period, for a total of 16 meetings for the year. Each Town Hall Meeting will consist of a group of 30 to 35 students invited by their respective class council. The invited students will be different for each Town Hall Meeting, increasing the number of students participating in the meetings. This would allow approximately 500 different voices giving input by the end of this year, 10 times that of last year’s GSC meetings, where about 50 club council members met each month.
The current construction occurring at Aragon is a significant factor for why Town Hall Meetings are each 30 to 35 students in size . “I have no SLR,” says Perino. “I can’t use the library. So for this year, I have to use classrooms. And classrooms can only hold 35.”
Town Hall Meetings allow students to “RSVP” to invitations and are not mandatory.
Perino says, “This way, class councils will connect with more members of their class through the invitation process. And secondly, students hopefully will feel like they want to take an interest in what’s happening in their student community.”
Perino adds, “The hope would be that people want to make Aragon the strongest community it can be.”
