Many clubs that used GroupMe as their main way of communicating have had to change their methods over the past year. This change stems from an administrative decision to ban GroupMe.
Early last school year, measures were taken due to GroupMe’s feature that allows people to join chats without being invited. Since GroupMe poses a risk to students via the lack of confidentiality, it creates possible exposure to people with ill intention.
Despite the ability in GroupMe to make your chats private, the administration still determined it was unsafe for students. After this change clubs at MHS have had to adapt.
“I’d say it’s definitely a little hard on recruitment for MASA; after the ban we weren’t able to put GroupMe QR codes anywhere and had to use StudentSquare instead,” MASA president Andrew Meng, senior, said.
Teachers are no longer able to be a part of GroupMe, which discourages students from making GroupMe chats for clubs. The administration has given a few different options for clubs and school organizations to communicate. Most clubs use the district app StudentSquare.
“When students see a StudentSquare join, they feel like it’s more of a commitment than just an information source,” Meng said. “I feel joining a StudentSquare is a lot different than joining a more casual GroupMe with extra info and collaboration easily accessible and where they can survey the clubs before they decide.”
Many clubs have needed to change their strategies to appeal to students in the school to try and improve recruitment.
“Sometimes it’s hard to make sure people are actually getting the message, so I have to ask people if they got the messages,” Crochet Club president Maddy Trout, sophomore, said.
There are also some clubs that were not affected at all because they are student led. This allows them to function outside of school regulations due to lessened staff oversight.
“Teachers were never really involved in the Philosophy Club, besides being there during meetings, so it didn’t affect us at all,” Philosophy Club Social Media Manager Seaver Vieyra, junior, said.
Many leaders of clubs have been making efforts to appeal to a wide variety of students, but not being able to use GroupMe has caused some organizational struggle. The district sanctioned forms of communication require staff input of new students. This causes a lag in time between when a student signs up for a club and when they might receive their first communication from the club.
“It is kind of hard on sponsors to manage when new people get added,” Meng said. “We were getting a lot of people to sign up, but not getting any messages until our sponsor sat down to accept them all.”
