There will soon be more school-wide events and collaboration between student programs thanks to the new Student Organizations Council established over the summer.

“The Student Organizations Council is something that I felt that we needed last spring,” founder Ben Prengler said. “I contacted Mr. Mayfield once he was announced as the new principal. I approached him and said ‘Hey, a lot of the student organizations, they need a lot more communication with one another.’”

One of the major goals of the Student Organizations Council is to help different school-wide programs communicate.

“One of my hopes that comes out of the executive council is that it will really help with communication between our many different student organizations,” Principal Chris Mayfield said. “There are so many great things that go on here that each student organization individually does.”

The new council has plans to sponsor new school-wide events.

“[We want to] be able to plan events on a much larger scale and have events reach a larger amount of the student body,” Prengler said. “We don’t want to do all the events in cooperation with one another, but at least an event once every other month to kind of collaborate as a whole school and come together behind a certain cause.”

Some of the collaborations include events that are already in existence.

“We plan on having the student body create our informative presentations usually done from outside to connect to everyone on a more personal level,” PALS representative Adam McDaniel said.

The Student Organizations Council also directly communicates their desires with the principal.

“We met with Mr. Mayfield over the summer the week before school started to talk to him about ways that we felt we could improve student programming at the school,” Prengler said. “Ways that we could improve school spirit, student involvement, all that sort of thing.”

It’s an initiative with strong administrative support.

“I think the benefit of the executive council is it gives student leaders the opportunity to talk with me as the principal,” Mayfield said. “And share some of the ideas they have so it creates a good working relationship between me and the student leaders.”

The Council is currently working on making sure all student organizations have members within its ranks.

“To my knowledge, not every single student organization [has a representative],” Prengler said. “There are still some that I’ve heard about but haven’t gotten in contact with the advisers or student representatives yet, that is still a work in progress, but we hope to reach out to those people soon.”