AGHS hosted Scott Backovich, founder of Envolve, to speak and carry out activities with students on Oct. 27. Envolve is a program with the mission of helping more students get engaged on their campuses.
Atascadero High School, Paulding Middle School, and Nipomo High School attended the event as well. Each school brought their leadership and ASB students to better learn how to grow their programs.
According to AGHS ASB director Shannon Hurtado, there were more than 200
students attending this training session at AGHS.
“Envolve is all about students coming together from all different schools to find new and creative ways to engage students through their activities, whether those are their assemblies or their spirit groups, or just everything they do on a day to day basis,” Backovich said.
Paulding Middle School brought all of their leadership students including their officer team.
“I’m really grateful that the high school included our middle school because I think the stronger we can make our middle school program, the stronger our high school program is going to be,” PMS ASB director Francesca Ardizzone said.
The main focus of this training session was to teach students how to get new students involved, not just the ones that often volunteer their time.
One of the activities that Backovich taught was Empathy Mapping, a brainstorming activity where students identify which groups are not participating in regular school activities and think about how they can be better involved.
Oftentimes, specific groups of commonly outgoing or extroverted students consistently participate in school activities. Alternately, there are students who rarely participate in school events that are usually more shy and introverted.
Most of the activities that leadership students host are targeted toward the outgoing group of students and there is little effort put into accommodating shy students’ participation levels.
“I want students to be able to look at their activities through a little bit of a different lens of not just engaging the same students over and over and over again, but finding new ways to engage students that usually we miss,” Backovich said.
Students brainstormed ideas about how to involve students who tend to not participate in school activities and created activities to interest the introverted and less-involved students. Even events completely tailored to shy students were discussed.
“Even if some of the events have the final product of wanting to get more hype and more energy like rallies for example, some people just don’t have that,” AGHS Spirit Commissioner Joss Robertson (‘27) said. “So you have to change parts of the event to fit it for other people too.”
Bringing local schools together helps build community and better each schools’ program.
“I think that today’s just a lot of fun; I think it’s also a really cool opportunity for the schools to collaborate with one another because oftentimes when we see other schools, it’s in a really hyper competitive environment and today is a little bit of a break from that and more of a collaborative one,” Backovich said.
Leadership students had the opportunity to be around other leadership students and got to learn from their programs to determine what’s working and what’s not.
“This event is honestly very inspiring because it brings a ton of people that are in leadership from different schools and also a lot of people that have similar personality types,” Robertson (‘27) said. “Its nice to be surrounded by a bigger community like that.”
