Leadership students at Howe Sound Secondary tried a new approach to bring different groups together to start off the school year.
On “Funky Friday” they put together a retreat for students as a team-building exercise called TEAM, which stands for Together Everyone Achieves More.
“Tonight is all about team-building, having fun, but tonight is also a competition,” leadership student Christian Smith, one of the main organizers, said to the group of about 40 students.
There are three main leadership classes within the school – the senior, aboriginal and athletic groups – and the plan, as co-organizer Alex Jevons told the Sea to Sky School District board of education at its regular September meeting, is to have them get to know each other. Between the three groups, there are about 70 students.
“All the leadership groups are quite different, but we want to bring them together,” she told the trustees.
The Friday evening event was a friendly competition, with students from each of the three groups mixed together to form yellow, red, blue and green teams that had to collaborate on a number of fun challenges.
“It’s all about combining the leadership classes and getting everyone to know each other,” Jevons said.
The event took place after school and through the evening mostly inside the school’s Eagle Eye Theatre. It began with each of the four teams, dressed in their colours, working on cheers that included chants, formations spelling out team names and even the occasional gravity-defying flip.
Over the course of the evening, the four groups took part in competitions such as “Square,” in which team members had to negotiate around each other while standing on a bench to get back to their original positions; “Minefield,” in which the team had to lead a blind-folded person through a grid while avoiding targets; and a ball race where the team had to move a ball positioned between each member without dropping it.
There was even team karaoke and a “Fear Factor” competition.
The aim was to come out on top, which included gift cards as prizes. In the end, it was the yellow team – mostly dressed in orange, as it was Orange Shirt Day Friday – that took the top spot.
Smith and Jevons came up with the idea of the retreat at the end of the previous school year and started planning to bring the three leadership groups together.
“I thought that would be fun to take on as a project,” Smith said.
The two students admit it was a bit of challenge to get some of the peers motivated to take part, perhaps because it was something new on the school calendar, but more students were interested as the day drew closer.
Jevons and Smith then appeared before the board of education at the regular monthly meeting on Sept. 14 to let the district know about the event.
Board chair Rick Price was impressed and touched on the collaborative aspect of the retreat.
“It fits so well with the kind of learning we really want to see,” he told the two students.
The leadership students’ hope is that the event will spur interest and lead to similar events in the future.
“What we hope for the first time is for people to spread the word,” Jevons said.
