Student Council attended a virtual regional conference last Monday to discuss mental health and come up with event ideas that follow COVID-19 restrictions. Normally, StuCo and several high schools across Kansas will travel to one high school for the day for this regional conference.

“In normal years, this conference would be held at a Kansas high school and StuCo members would travel there for the day to experience a lot more interactive activities,” Senior Class representative Josie Summers said. “This was still a good substitution though.”

StuCo was mostly on the call together even though it was an A day. Group B students had permission to attend the conference at the school and then leave immediately after. The groups were still divided up to meets social distancing guidelines.

“There were so many members in the building though that we had the freshmen and sophomores Zoom in as a group from the Little Theater and the juniors and seniors as a group from the band room,” Summers said. “Remote students Zoomed in individually from home.”

Students were introduced to Lori Kiblinger — a retired educator, administrator and student council leader from Kansas — who gave the speech “Full Plates… Clear Vision!” The speech aimed to inspire students to bring awareness in their schools and become a positive force to their student body. 

“We did a cool activity where we each got a paper plate and a marker and on one side of the plate we wrote things that are stressing us out right now,” Summers said. “On the other side, we wrote examples of activities to nurture our physical, emotional, spiritual and intellectual health.”

StuCo’s main takeaway from the event was to stay positive and enjoy life as it is right now.
“Even though it is a crazy and stressful year, it is so important to be positive and make the most of it,” Summers said.