Clubs

Born To Be A Leader

Club presidents work around new COVID protocols.

Photographer Nicole Watson Students singing up for clubs after a school year of distance learning. AHS held club rush on October 5th to October 8th.

By GabrieElla Quiliza

Although COVID-19 hasn’t stopped clubs from existing, it has certainly put a strain on what they’re able to accomplish this year. Club leaders, however, are the ones that are suffering the most.

“Yeah, dealing with both clubs having problems is honestly taking a toll on me. Like, sometimes there will be things that I don’t know the answer to, but as club president, I’m the one that the members go to when they have questions about what’s happening next.” Senior Mia Celzo said.

Although Celzo has been in Interact since Freshman year, this is her first year acting as the co-president. Along with Arroyo Interact, Celzo is also a co-president for Automadons. Both clubs are very reliant on holding and attending events, but with all the new COVID protocols taking place, it’s hard to operate as normal.

Sophomore Zahara Safiq is the sole president for the debate club, which means that all of the club’s responsibilities land on her. Although it’s a difficult time for clubs to be active, Safiq embraces her obligations.

“Because I’m the only person leading, I’m doing a lot of other things at once. Even though I love debate, sometimes it gets pushed back. Like, I haven’t had a meeting in three weeks and I’m supposed to do it every two weeks. I feel like it’s hard to balance, but with that being said, I wouldn’t change it for the world. I love helping others and I love doing what I’m doing for the school.” Safiq said.

Senior Gene Kung, co-president of CSF, finds that COVID has really impacted his members more than his officers. Without fundraisers, CSF members won’t be able to receive their promised awards and/or scholarships.

“Yeah for sure it’s different leading at this time, especially with all these COVID protocols and stuff. For example, for CSF, when we need scholarships, we need fundraisers, and to get fundraisers, we need to go through that process of approval from JRod and ASB and basically due to COVID, it has a lot more loopholes to go through and it makes it so that we have significantly less fundraisers, so we have to do other things. In general, COVID has made clubs less popular, especially last year. We just have to adapt to get more members.” Kung said.

Celzo’s biggest issue is finding a way to allow Interact to give back to the community while also following COVID protocols. The little community service opportunities that do come up sometimes get canceled, which Celzo then has to deal with.

“For Interact, which is the club we’ve been having the most problems with since that requires us to have a lot of people come together to work at events, it’s been difficult since there hasn’t been any events going on, because they keep on getting canceled, so it’s been hard to find things for our club members to do.” Celzo said

Since Safiq’s freshman year of high school was carried out through distance learning, she wasn’t able to experience the full effect of AHS clubs. Now that she’s back on campus, however, Safiq’s first year as club president is filled with balancing the importance of safety and the importance of community.

“I feel like I have a different vision on that, because this is technically my first year here. As a sophomore, I didn’t know how Arroyo worked before, so I’m kind of biased. With that being said, I definitely think it did hinder a lot of things. Like, I feel like we weren’t really able to bond as well because you have to worry about eating in classrooms, making sure no one gets hurt or gets COVID, and it’s just extra things to talk about.” Safiq said.

Despite all the new protocols put in place, Celzo has found an upside through all the chaos. She feels as if the time that is not being spent in meetings is temporarily relieving her of her obligations.

“An upside would be the fact that since we are not meeting up so often, I have more time in between when events are taking place, so I have time to think through how the event will happen and more time to finish paperwork.” Celzo said.

Although it’s Celzo’s last year being a co-president, she hopes that when COVID eventually dies down, her clubs will be able to accomplish everything they’ve planned for.

“For my club’s future, I’m hoping that once we get out of COVID, my clubs will be able to be more active around school and the community. I hope that they’re able to have more events and gain more members.” Celzo said.

MAKING THE CUT

12 : Three stories about rejection from the perspective of being the rejectors 13 : Three people share their experience being on the recieving end of rejection 14 : Examining how college has gotten more competitive,resulting in high school seniors facing more rejection 15 : One senior shares his experience with college rejection,and two sophomores express their concerns about future college rejections.