Volunteers needed to sign up students for dodgeball tournament during lunches

The Week of Service Dodgeball Tournament needs volunteers to help sign up teams during lunches. Hours are available for sitting at these tables! Further details available on the Google Form.

Google form link: https://docs.google.com/a/bedfordnhk12.net/forms/d/1xfFw9Lu6pPVJ4uS2l3v6Lm_wr-7kaXQ2psridHbak7c/edit?usp=sharing
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Sophia Dobrowski

Independent Meeting Pilot Program

The "Optional Meeting" concept was designed in Fall 2014 as a way to break up our large membership into smaller, more productive chunks. This policy change occurred because members observed the theater meetings were unproductive and usually involved listening more than doing. While it is true that the smaller, optional meetings have potential, the concept still needs work.

Take the March 17 "Optional Meeting", for example. It was well attended, with nearly 80 students showing up to participate. Members who were working on Week of Service activities found plenty to do, and the room was abuzz with activity. However, an informal poll revealed that nearly 2/3 of the students there were in attendance simply because they had to be for attendance. That's terrible. That's not why we have meetings.

Meetings are recommended as a way to plan events, practice our leadership skills, and to stay in communication with one another. They are not supposed to separate the students who can get to school early in the morning from the students who can't. They are not supposed to be a chore.

Thus, NHS will be piloting an Independent Meeting Program for the remainder of the year to see if it can effectively replace our current system. In order to test it authentically, any meeting submitted via this program will count. There are lots of opportunities left to use this idea this year.

Here's how it works:

Students can plan and attend their own meetings, provided the purpose of the meeting is clearly stated, matches with NHS goals, and is of an appropriate length and quorum (number of members present). Meeting-goers must record meeting minutes, and submit to the adviser for approval. This flowchart explains the process in detail:

Incidentally, all of our processes now have flowcharts that can be reviewed here or found under the new "Stay Active" sidebar.

The Meeting Minutes Form has been added to the NHS member links. Let's see what happens!

Optional Meeting Agenda, News & Notes

Tomorrow's optional meeting will be available for Week of Service groups to further plan their activities, begin to finalize Week of Service scheduling, and to address any NHS-related questions. A discussion on the purpose of meetings will also be on the agenda.

If you're interested in any of these agenda items, more detail is covered below.

Attendance

Attendance records are now up to date except for Junior attendance for the 2/18/2016 optional meeting. Who has the attendance list? 

Attendance probations have been delivered through advisories.

Week of Service

Activity	Status
Prom Dress Drive	Good to Go!
Be Your Family’s Energy Watchdog	Good to Go!
Peer Tutoring Classroom Assistance	Good to Go!
Helping our Nursing Home (Hillsborough County)	Good to Go!
Visiting the Carlyle Place	Good to Go!
1000 Paper Cranes	Good to Go!
New Horizons	Good to Go!
Restoring to Restore	Status Update?
Relay for Life - Suns and Moons Sale	Status Update?
Spring Black Light Dance	Status Update?
Send a Compliment, Save a Life	Status Update?
Dodge for a Cause	Status Update?
Joe Dambach Memorial Fundraiser	Status Update?

I am proud that all Week of Service groups made plans to meet with Mr. Hagen regarding the questions he still had about their planned activity. But, I need to know if your activity is now approved. Could you please give me a status update about how your meeting went?

Optional Meeting Alternatives
We need to repurpose and renew our commitment to why we hold multiple meetings during the year, and what it means to be a commited and functioning NHS member. I will be leading a discussion and proposal tomorrow and will be looking for feedback from the membership on my idea.

Room Helpers for SP Celebration Days

The Senior Project committee is looking for one/two NHS Juniors to help facilitate NHS volunteers to help make sure Seniors are all set tech-wise prior to giving their presentation on the two SP Celebration Days (June 2-3, 2016). Sample of some issues in the past have been because a computer is not mirrored to projector, or more batteries are needed for a clicker etc. Students do not need to be an expert with technology -- just comfortable helping troubleshoot if a situation arises. NHS volunteers would be responsible for checking in with 6-8 rooms prior to presentations happening. If anyone is interested in help spear-heading this, please feel free to contact Mr. Sheil and he can fill in more details. Thanks in advance for your time and consideration. - SP Committee
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Mr. Sheil
SP Committee Member

PWS Fun Night Volunteers Needed

Tuesday, March 29th is our Family Fun Night from 4 to 7:30. Peter Woodbury School Family Fun Night needs volunteers!!! I am sure many of you remember family fun nights at your elementary school. We are reaching out for your support our current elementary students. We are looking for help with ticket sales, serving pizza and ice cream, and helping with activities. 12 Volunteers are needed for Session 1 from 4:00 to 5:30 12 Volunteers are needed for Session 2 from 6:00 to 7:30 Also looking for a few helpers for set up (3:30 to 4) and take down (7:30 to 8) Please email Sue Armstrong at armstrongs@sau25.net to sign up. Any questions please ask! Thank you for your support!!!
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Sue Armstrong
PWS Teacher

Optional meeting dedicated to WoS activity planning

This is your reminder that we do have a meeting on the schedule tomorrow. It's optional, so it's set in room 113/115 and dedicated to a smaller workshop setting.

Our goal tomorrow is to give time for students to work on their Week of Service plans. As a reminder here is how our WoS plans look:

 

Activity	Status
Prom Dress Drive	Good to Go!
Be Your Family’s Energy Watchdog	Good to Go!
Peer Tutoring Classroom Assistance	Good to Go!
Helping our Nursing Home (Hillsborough County)	Good to Go!
Visiting the Carlyle Place	Good to Go!
1000 Paper Cranes	Good to Go!
New Horizons	Good to Go!
Restoring to Restore	Meet with Admin
Relay for Life - Suns and Moons Sale	Meet with Admin
Spring Black Light Dance	Meet with Admin
Send a Compliment, Save a Life	Meet with Admin
Dodge for a Cause	Meet with Admin
Joe Dambach Memorial Fundraiser	Meet with Admin

Tomorrow would be a good time for ideas that need to meet with administration check with me and learn how to do that. If you are unattached to an idea of your own, the meeting might be an opportunity for you to jump on with helping plan one of the above activities.

There are only FIVE meetings until Week of Service begins. 

Week of Service activities have passed administrative review!

Good news! No ideas that I brought to administration were outright denied. With some tinkering, the list below should be the list we present to the school during the week of April 11th - 16th:

Activity	Status
Prom Dress Drive	Good to Go!
Be Your Family’s Energy Watchdog	Good to Go!
Peer Tutoring Classroom Assistance	Good to Go!
Helping our Nursing Home (Hillsborough County)	Good to Go!
Visiting the Carlyle Place	Good to Go!
1000 Paper Cranes	Good to Go!
New Horizons	Good to Go!
Restoring to Restore	Meet with Admin
Relay for Life - Suns and Moons Sale	Meet with Admin
Spring Black Light Dance	Meet with Admin
Send a Compliment, Save a Life	Meet with Admin
Dodge for a Cause	Meet with Admin
Joe Dambach Memorial Fundraiser	Meet with Admin

Activities that have a "Good to Go!" status, you are free to begin planning your Week of Service. Your idea will be happening! Those of you that have had your activity marked "Meet with Admin" will need to meet with Mr. Hagen. Generally, this is because you will need further training as to how to run your idea at the school, or in some cases, there are questions of liability. 

If your group needs to meet with the administration, contact Mr. Ahnert to get preparation ahead of time for what Mr. Hagen will be talking to you about. Mr. Ahnert will, of course, also be available at this Thursday's optional meeting.

Great job, groups!

Kids Vote Volunteers Needed!

Hello, everyone! There is an awesome service opportunity on March 8th. Because it is election day, we have been offered a service project in which we help with Kids Vote. This lets the kids of Bedford vote for fun and color in the Cafeteria. It starts at 9 am and ends at 7 pm and it is asked that we work in 2-hour shifts, meaning, every 2 hours we switch out the volunteers. What is needed is 6 volunteers for every 2-hour shift (which in total is 30 volunteers) and each volunteer earns 2 Chapter Service Hours! Here I have a Google Spreadsheet for you to sign up if you're willing! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1zfJkmi1ZuQdEAwbv9ZP86I-zCC9U1fTaJVaVPmCdM_g/edit?usp=sharing
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Jill Tokac

And don't forget to take your Democracy in Action hours, too -- Mr. Ahnert

Mandatory Meeting Tomorrow

Topics will include Week of Service updates, GPA checks, Kids' Vote plans, and other service opportunities.

Here's the agenda.

See you at 7:00 A.M. in the theater.

Here are the WoS projects I have...

Of the 21 - 22 activity ideas that made it to the optional meeting deadline, these are the 10 final drafts I received.

Activity Name	Student Planners
New Horizons	Alexis, Erica
1000 Paper Cranes	Kyra, Peninah
Restoring for Restore	Peninah
Visiting the Carlyle Place	Elizabeth, Clare
Helping our Nursing Home (Hillsborough County)	Claire, Bridget, Ellen
Peer Tutoring Classroom Assistance	Alyssa, Brionne, Emerson, Molly, Erika
Relay for Life — Suns and Moons Sale	Kenzie, Ricky
Spring Black Light Dance	Kayla, Cassie
Send a Compliment, Save a Life	Carolyn, Mckenzie, Emma, Emily, Meghan
Be Your Family’s “Energy Watchdog”	Elisa, Nadine

If you expected to see your idea on here and you don't, let me know ASAP. My meeting with the principal has been officially scheduled for 12:30 P.M. tomorrow, so you have until then.

I know it was a tough turnaround with winter vacation tossed in the middle of a due date, so I know I might hear from some of you. I mean, 10 is still really good. 

One last thing: To my fellow dudes, where are you? Only one NHS bro wants to good things for other people? C'mon, the principles of NHS are not tied to gender. Our numbers should reflect that.  

Officer meeting today

Attention officers:

This Thursday is the mandatory meeting for March, which means we need to meet and plan the agenda during advisory today.

Junior and senior officers, stop by Mr. Dempsey's office during advisory today to at least check in to your officer role.

Pick up your WoS ideas, finalize, and return by 2/29

That was a boisterous and productive meeting. When the activity died down, we ended with 22 ideas and there are a couple more still floating around out there. We met our goal!

If you were not in attendance, what you missed is that each idea planning sheet was reviewed by a team of 4-6 NHS members. These members applied constructive feedback via sticky notes, like so:

IDEAS!!

What you need to do now, is finalize your idea. If you didn't pick up your idea this morning, I've put it in the manila folder on the NHS bulletin board. Be careful to not knock off your sticky notes. Please type up a copy of your final activity plan using the sheet by February 29th (That's the day we get back from February vacation). 

Here, once again, is the Blank WoS template. Feel free to change font sizes and the like to fit your project in the two pages provided. 

I hope to have approval from the administration by our March 3rd mandatory meeting. It's coming up quick!

Week of Service ideas reviewed and finalized at tomorrow's optional meeting

One or two more ideas have found their way into the bulletin board, but I know there's a lot of other ideas percolating out there that may not actually be on paper. Tomorrow is the day we stop collecting ideas.

At the meeting, we will break into small groups and review the ideas presented plus make suggestions and improvements. You don't necessarily have to be on hand to represent your idea, but if you're particularly invested, you may want to be available to answer questions.

Make-A-Wish Foundation Star Sale

All profits from selling Make-A-Wish Foundation stars will go to the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Stars are $1 in cash, and selling 5 grants a half hour of chapter service hours. Please fill out your name, advisory, and number of stars you take. If you need any extra stars, them and the sign out sheet for them will be in the cooking classroom. When done selling, please place the money in a ziplock bag with your name on it, and the number of stars you took (the amount of dollars in the bag should match this number) to Mrs. Brooks or Isabelle Kapoian. To return unsold stars, please place them in a ziplock bag with your name and the number of stars in it to Mrs. Brooks or Isabelle Kapoian.
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Isabelle Kapoian
President of the BHS Wish Club

WoS Reality Check

Snow Day + Election Day + Sports + Model UN + No time to work together = A week is too short to develop 20 Week of Service events.

Instead of having all ideas due to tomorrow's optional meeting, we will use tomorrow's meeting as an hour of time to work with our friends on activities we thought we might want to put together, but changed our mind because it felt like there would be no time.

Some people have had good ideas, but I've had suggestions for how the ideas could be better implemented and there's just no time to take care of that in a week.

Our new goal will be one week later: The optional meeting on February 18th.

Week of Service Idea Update

We're up to 4! 16 to go.

To give you an idea, I've asked one group if I could share their project idea with the rest of NHS. (This doesn't mean that their idea will be approved, but it does mean that their form is nicely filled out).

Check out the Week of Service example planner here:

Junior Officer Results

Here are the results of your officer elections. 92 ballots were cast. Only winners are posted. Results can be shared privately with candidates who ask, but I do not post the rest of the results out of respect to our disappointed members.

President
Clare Zarka

Vice President
Nick Courtney

Secretary
Anna Bogursky

Treasurer
Ethan John

Historian
Jake DeAngelis

Congratulations and stay tuned for a special meet-and-greet meeting with the Senior officers (likely to be the Monday, February 15th activity block).

Last call for juniors to vote

Officer Ballot
This is a reminder that the ballot closes tomorrow morning (about 8:00 am) for the officer elections. There are currently 90 votes recorded, so about 19 juniors are still out there eligible to vote. You don't have to, but this is your last call. The ballot was sent to your email.

New Communication Tool
Speaking of email, this is also a test post of our new email addresses. The email NHS2016@bedfordnhk12.net and NHS2017@bedfordk12.net should automatically now send blogger posts to every current member of NHS.

Week of Service
No update on how many activity ideas we have so far because of the snow day. However, I want to encourage this as an idea: We could use some ideas with a peer tutoring focus. One idea could be as simple as working with the library to have NHS students doing tutoring each block at a designated table. And let's go beyond tutoring, too. Do you know how to make a killer Prezi? Run a teaching session. What about a "What is it like to go on a college tour?" info session? How to find your first part-time job? Or, are you really good at finding research material in the library? Anything where you are sharing your skills, knowledge, and experience as upperclassmen with our peers, is a worthwhile activity.

Week of Service Project Idea Planner

• List of Project Ideas

• Google Doc version of Activity Planner

Preview of tomorrow's ballot

Here is tomorrow's ballot. Candidates should be prepared to speak for about a minute about why they are interested in their position.

It will be another busy mandatory meeting. See you in the theater!