Student Council members assembled to develop a close-knit team and bring forward new ideas for the upcoming school year at the annual Student Council retreat at the Manhattan High School on Aug. 13. The retreat lasted six hours and included team building activities and individual class meetings.

“Working together and learning how to work as a team is really important to StuCo,” counselor Dustin Duntz said.

To begin the retreat, members participated in various games in order to become acquainted with one another.

“We played get to know you games because there were a bunch of new freshmen that came up that we didn’t know yet,” student body vice president Neely Joyce said.

The freshmen will not hold elections until school begins which can make the team assembling part more difficult. Their conversations mostly consist of the office they want to run for and getting to know the upperclassmen.

“It’s been fun meeting everybody and learning about everybody,” freshman Morgan Rogers said.

Shortly after, Andrew Cherry led team building exercises to encourage teamwork throughout Student Council as a whole. Cherry holds these workshops for Student Council clubs all across Kansas.

“He tried to get us in groups mostly of people we didn’t know,” junior class president Parker Wilson said, “not really trying to focus on people that were your age but just trying to get an overall feel for everybody in student council this year.”

Later, individual class meetings were held to discuss future plans and ideas for the upcoming school year. Ideas that aren’t for this upcoming semester are written down and will be discussed later in the year.

“This meeting was a lot of goal setting and a lot of looking into the future,” senior class secretary Christina Price said. “After this meeting it sets the presidence for the rest of the year.”

While seniors debated on the class t-shirt design, junior class officers were busy brainstorming classified prom theme ideas.

“Prom wise, I think we threw around a few good ideas in general.” Wilson said. “I don’t want to give anything away,”

Being in charge of such a large event at the school is intimidating to say the least. A great majority of students look forward to prom all year.

“It’s a lot to handle but at the same time, like I said I’m very excited and hopefully I won’t screw it up,” Wilson said.

Other members of the Student Council student body are enthusiastic to become the voice for the student body.

“I think it’s really exciting being able to plan things and help be the backbone of the school kinda,” Joyce said, “help be the connector part between all the different clubs and different students and really be a voice for the students.”