Jamie Kim co-editor-in-chief
In an effort to gain more feedback from students, ASB held its first transparency meeting on Jan. 30 during lunch at the Jon Cherney Lecture Hall.
While the ASB class is an open forum, where any student can walk in and participate in ASB’s discussions, this meeting was planned in the hopes of engaging directly with the student body and giving a chance for students unable to attend the ASB class during their fifth period to share their concerns and opinions.
This meeting began with introductions from six ASB members, who all led the conversation with the attending students, and transitioned into a brief presentation about upcoming events and ASB’s goals, one of which is to “hear, understand and implement everyone’s ideas.”
“ASB really stresses the importance of the student voice. Almost every single day, we’re talking about ‘What do the students want?’,” club commissioner Samantha Boudaie said. “I think this was the perfect time to really hear them, and the comments we heard today will definitely reflect in our events. If there’s anything that ASB does, it’s stress the importance of students.”
There were fewer than 12 non-ASB students in attendance, something Head Row Vice President Ryan Abrishami hopes will change for the next transparency meeting.
“I definitely want to change our scope of publicizing. I think word-of-mouth, as someone mentioned today, is very important. I mentioned that starting a chain effect of each person telling three people, and that chain continuing, will definitely affect the outcome of these events. The importance of good publicity is something I learned a lot about from this meeting,” Abrishami said.
Despite low attendance, students and ASB members discussed topics such as raising school spirit, introducing student voice into reconfiguration and improving the quality of events.
“I think there should have been more people here; to have more people would be better so that they can hear more opinions,” junior Jaime Jacoby said. “But I still think that ASB’s initiative to have this in the first place was good; having a response is better than having no response.”