BY CHLOE HARBAUGH
BEST BUDDIES
AVA LEONARD & DAX HUEZO-VARGAS
6 STATESMAN
There is no doubt that high school can be one of the most challenging times of a person’s life. Students with Intellectual Developmental Disabilities (IDDs) have additional challenges navigating schools. LHS senior Mitch Eichacker saw this problem around our school and wanted to solve it. His solution: Best Buddies. Eichacker first learned about Best Buddies while attending a convention at RHS. Eichacker knew that LHS had many students with IDDs and wanted to bring the club to LHS. The club officially started at LHS two years ago. At first, it was just Eichacker and a few classmates that he had recruited. “It started kind of small with just me and the people I could recruit, mostly seniors,” said Eichacker. “In our two years here, the amount of members, including underclassmen and upperclassmen, have grown.” Best Buddies takes students with IDDs and matches them with students without IDDs. The club now has around 30 members. About 20 of them are matched with buddies, and then there are about 10 people that are not matched but are still involved with meetings and fundraisers and still get to have fun. The pairs are chosen by the executive board, the adviser and the RISE teachers. Once the pair is matched, they do what friends do; they hang out in and outside of school whether that involves going to the movies, playing video games, hanging out or eating out. Trey Naasz, LHS’s current Best Buddies’ adviser, learned about the club from Drake Bachmeier, the club’s former adviser. When the club was looking for a new adviser, Naasz was on their radar.
“I had [already] built a pretty good relationship with Yonni and Dax, who are members of Best Buddies, and my interactions with them is always a fun part of my day,” said Naasz. “When Mr. Struwe and Dr. Raeder came...and asked me if I wanted to become the new adviser for Best Buddies, I didn’t even have to think about it; I just said yes.” The club is made of the buddies and their pairs, the associate buddies, the executive board and the adviser. The executive board, which consists of seniors Eichacker, Kate Sargent, Emily Hall and Taylor Ericson, meets in a smaller group to plan events and make decisions. They do the majority of the planning and behind the scenes work, making sure everything runs smoothly. The buddies bring the fun. They are just like any other member of the club. They participate in all the group events and just have a great time. Associate buddies play a big part in Best Buddies. They help with fundraising, participate in the large group events and just help the club in general. Although they are not directly paired with a buddy, they still show up to the group events and help everyone have fun. The club’s adviser, Naasz, plays a significant role in the club. He contacts the people to help plan for Best Buddies’ big events and helps in coordinating those events by finding spaces for meetings and parties and supplies. Naasz is passionate about the club, which has led to him finding more activities for Best Buddies
