Written by Alexandra Steyn

The recent decision to use Friday’s community time period for community forum instead of club time has been a subject of annoyance and frustration for Upper School students. Many Upper Schoolers, if not most, lead and/or have joined multiple clubs. Without Friday club time, many clubs are now forced to meet every other week and risk losing multiple members. The two weeks between each club meeting means that people will have forgotten what happened during the previous club session, adding to the difficulty of creating a club narrative. For clubs who work with or support nonprofit organizations, this reality is especially harsh, as they need to coordinate a project in support of an organization without consistent meeting time to do so.

Community forum is used as an extension of community meeting. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Quagliaroli explained that presentations, student groups, and other important events and issues that community meeting cannot cover would be included during this time instead of being pushed back a week. The purpose of community forum is to give voice to high schoolers’ different programs and ideas instead of just weekly updates, which are given during community time. So far, community forum has been used for lectures on various topics, such as the Global Travel Programs that occurred in June.

Last year, Upper School students voiced their concerns about not having enough club time even with Tuesday and Friday club meetings, and asked the administration to add another club meeting time. The administration has done the opposite. Space Pace, a senior who leads both the Model UN and DREAM clubs, described his frustration that he has had to “put off a lot of important work for DREAM in order to prepare students for an upcoming Model UN conference”.  Since DREAM is a club working to make the school more accessible to disabled students, it requires consistent meetings and a significant amount of work. The reality of taking away club time is that Pace’s goals for the club may not come to fruition, or the timeline for the club will have to be pushed back. Pace also mentioned that while community forum was put in place to bring together the upper school community, close bonds between upperclassmen, lowerclassmen, and teachers are formed instead through face-to-face meetings and student groups such as clubs. He said that community forum “directly limits the amount of time students have to make connections outside of the classroom,” and that because of this, he explained, “I barely know any of the underclassmen because I barely have any opportunities to interact with them”. With less club time, important friendships between different grades have become harder to create, especially if club meetings are the only times students can see those friends.

Community forum may be necessary at certain points throughout the year, but club time should be the priority. Clubs strengthen bonds between the student body and administrators, offer a way for students to become involved in the RCDS community, and require consistent meeting times to accomplish students’ goals. Community forum has the unintended outcome of limiting the number of clubs students can join and forcing leaders of multiple clubs to focus on one club for the time being. This takes away from the impact students can have on their communities through clubs.