GSA

The Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) is a club with an especially important objective. To illustrate the purpose of the club, co-club presidents Fiona Swanson and Milo Armstrong discuss its primary goals.

“We provide a safe place for queer and allied students on campus. Not a lot of kids have the opportunity to express themselves and be who they are in a safe place,” Swanson said. 

The club offers the opportunity and foundation for a community of students who wish to be able to be who they are and inspire others to also embrace who they are.

“We like to encourage students to find community and hang out in a spot where they feel safe,” Swanson said. 

Swanson and Armstrong have both been an active part of the GSA community since their sophomore year, putting two years under both of their belts. A form of the GSA club existed prior to their inclusion, however, it was much less organized. 

“There was already kind of a club before I started, but it was very unofficial,” Swanson said. 

It was Armstrong who sparked their involvement, inviting Swanson to join in establishing a more official version of the club. After their efforts, they were elected co-presidents. 

“During Pride Month we like to do activities and go to Pride,” Swanson said. “Last year we went to the Pride Festival in SLO and we did tie-dye T-shirts,” 

Pride Month takes place during June and celebrates LGBTQ+ rights and culture. The tradition began after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, inspired by violent police raids of the Stonewall Inn gay bar in New York City. 

“Last year we had some meetings about discrimination on campus, where we were communicating with administrators and talking to students about their experiences,” Swanson said. 

GSA Club is also collaborating with the Young Progressives Club on a poster project showcasing transgender artists with the goal of spreading positivity and awareness around Arroyo Grande’s campus. 

“We’re thinking about doing pride bracelets [and] we talked about getting binders for trans youth and doing a gender-affirming…clothing closet for trans students,” Swanson said.

The club is not just all hard work and projects, most of the time the club likes to spend time together. 

“Most of the time, we’re just hanging out, eating lunch, having fun, and just being ourselves,” Swanson said. 

Swanson has learned a lot being a leader in the GSA Club community. 

“So far it’s been great. I’ve received very minimal backlash and people being mean. I’ve met really great people through the club. I’ve been able to develop and understand my own identity and meet other people and learn more about other identities as well,” Swanson said. 

Swanson reports cultivating a great sense of community with close friends and even those who were completely new to her. 

“It’s been really nice for me to be able to be a person in our club that people can go to. It’s been really good to know that I have an impact on younger people,” Swanson said. 

The GSA hopes to continue to impact the larger community of Arroyo Grande High School by creating more awareness of queer identities and respect for those identities.

“Hate crimes come from ignorance and not knowing and just being uneducated and getting education from harmful stereotypes and biases. I think it’d be really important for teachers to be able to create a safe space for students to have and be able to have safe discussions about things, especially in classes like history,” Swanson said. 

There is an importance for the GSA club that queer identities are not made taboo or a subject that is unable to be talked about. 

“I think as a whole I would like our campus culture to have a little bit more respect because while people might not be yelling slurs or being outwardly aggressive, there’s always a sense of talking down about queer identities,” Swanson said. 

“Anyone’s more than welcome to hang out even if you’re just an ally,” Swanson said. “If I could say something, I’d say be kind to everyone, and respect people.” 

Robotics

The Robotics Club is one of the larger clubs on campus that work to compete with other schools across the state in their subject matter like Speech and Debate or Mock Trial. Robotics focuses on competitions as well as STEM education.

“This year specifically, we’ve been doing this thing where we go to Grover Heights Elementary School and we’ve been teaching the elementary school kids how to do VEX robotics,” Club President Isabelle Bowdey said. 

The Robotics club meets nightly from six to nine and the team is broken up into sub-teams that each have their own role in the robotics constructing process.

“Our biggest sub-team is fabrication and they spend their time machining all of the parts and cutting them and putting them on our robot,” Bowdey said. 

Bowdey herself is a part of the programming sub-team. 

“We use Java programming and this program called VS code,” Bowdey said. “We write all the code that runs the robot, and it’s the same code that they use in the computer science class.” 

The Robotics club is sponsored by an organization called First, and they are the ones that give out the competitions that the club competes in. The topic of the competition and the date it will be held is announced in January. 

“This year [the competition] is [in] March, next weekend, actually,” Bowdey said. “Then we compete again at the end of April.” 

The robotics team is currently meeting so often in order to meet the time constraints to build their bot. They used to only have around six weeks to construct the robot for the task at the competition, but recently they have been slightly more lenient. 

“Despite the added time we’re usually pretty far behind because we do a lot teaching-wise and we teach ourselves how to do everything before we actually build the robot,” Bowdey said. “We want to do it thoroughly.” 

This year’s challenge for their bot is to pick up cubes and cones and put them in designated areas to score points. 

“Right now we’re building an arm that can pick up the cones and cubes and score them,” Bowdey said.

This year the robotics team has around 30 members, which allows for the team to not have to do as much extensive work and also allows for a larger budget when all members of the club contribute funds. The year prior there were nearly half that many members with only sixteen. 

“[it] was a really small team, but it allowed us to be really dedicated about it,” Bowdey said. 

A year ago, when Bowdey was vice president, she and the robotics team went to Las Vegas for a competition. There they had a whole team get-together with a barbeque and party. 

“We got to meet a bunch of people from all across California and we all stayed at the same hotel because there was a big hotel right by the convention center. It was a super fancy hotel,” Bowdey said. 

At the party, some of the other robotic students from other schools brought a ton of glowsticks, and the robotic team got to construct glow stick towers using their engineering skills. 

“It was nice to meet so many different people who are into robotics and like, form a bunch of friendships,” Bowdey said.

The Arroyo Grande High School Robotics team still has a groupchat with other robotics programs in the area to keep in touch. 

A year ago during Bowdey’s vice presidency was also her first year on the programming team. Bowdey has been a member of the Robotics club for three years, starting off as a part of the strategy sub-team her freshman year, having not participated her sophomore year. 

“I didn’t know anything about Java programming before I went on the programming team and most people don’t know anything [when they join a sub-team],” Bowdey said. 

The Robotics Club is friendly and welcoming to newcomers who only need to have an interest in the club to join. The club has many mentors that volunteer who are either former members of the club or parents of club members to help teach anyone new. There are around 8 mentors helping the robotics club students.

“They know specific things like we have people who do programming for their whole career and we have one member who does prosthetic limbs and teaches us how to make things out of that material,” Bowdey said.

The team’s climber robot last year featured limbs made from the same as what a prosthetic would be made from. 

“Once we start to learn things, by the time we’re seniors we know [enough] so we can teach the freshmen,” Bowdey said. 

Bowdey herself has learned quite a lot since her initial joining of the club. Bowdey showed off her newfound knowledge with the team’s bot last year that was commanded to run a fully autonomous 15-second action. 

According to Bowdey, “That’s basically where the robot does its own thing for 15 seconds based on what we programmed it to do.” 

“I really liked doing that kind of stuff because I don’t have to actually do anything, I just get to watch it work,” Bowdey said. 

Alongside autonomous commands, Bowdey also enjoys the leadership aspect she has taken in the Robotics program. 

“I never wanted to talk when I was a freshman, and being president has helped me [with] public speaking a lot because we do bi-weekly meetings. I get in front of the team and tell everyone what we’re doing and it also helps a lot with soft skills because I get to communicate with all the sub-team leads and all the people in charge,” Bowdey said. 

Bowdey enjoys the opportunity to coordinate the processes and inner workings of the robotics team and their construction of the bot. 

“It’s pretty fun to see, if you’ve done something all by yourself and with your friends, it all happens,” Bowdey said. 

Hispanos Unidos

Hispanos Unidos is a club that is engaged in activities celebrating Hispanic culture and its community. 

“A couple weeks ago, we did a Kahoot which I ended up winning, it was pretty fun,” club member Itzela Rodriguez said. 

The Kahoot was on famous Mexican TV show characters, such as the 1972 Mexican sitcom, “El Chavo del Ocho,” and types of food most popular in Latin America and other areas. 

“Overall [the club] has been mostly about celebrating or coming together as a club and enjoying talking about childhood memories as kids,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez has enjoyed contributing towards school-wide events such as the winter door decoration contest as well as games similar to the Kahoots, like Family Feud style games.

Currently, the Hispanos Unidos club is working towards supporting the field workers in our community with a club fundraiser. 

Pokemon 

Pokemon club is a hidden gem of a club, with a truly wholesome community objective.

“We love to discuss all things related to Pokemon, and we love to spread the love of Pokemon,” Club President and founder Benjamin Slowinski said. 

Slowinski created the club just this year and is learning the ropes of being a club president and leader. 

“It’s been pretty fun. It’s pretty easy to handle because we have a small group of people and we’re all pretty good friends,” Slowinski said.

The Pokemon club has already got the hang of all the general club business, having participated in the Winter Club Spectacular and giving out 100 dollars worth of Pokemon cards to kids. 

Slowinski’s fascination with Pokemon began around when he was eight years old. 

“I’ve always had hyper fixations and Pokemon is one of those hyper fixations, I guess ever since I’ve been a wee little lad,” Slowinski said. 

Slowinski has always been intrigued by the creative designs of pokemon and collecting all of the cards. Currently, the sense of nostalgia for an old childhood fixation has kept the club’s spirit alive. 

“Our meetings are revolving around some way of giving back to the community. We like to brainstorm ideas of what we went to do like a toy drive or donating toys to kids, or we have money that we’ve earned and are in the process of tying to donate right now,” Slowinski said.

Slowinski and his friends in the Pokemon Club focus their meetings on mostly improving the community and trying to donate to elementary schools around the district. 

Crochet & Knitting 

“Our club is the second largest club, most of [our members] are crocheters, most of them were new. I taught them so I’m really proud of them because now they love crocheting lots of things. We have a couple knitters too,” Guerrero said. 

The difference between crochet & knitting is that crochet involves a single hook whereas knitting is a technique with two needles. 

Guerrero learned how to crochet really young, but did not truly pick it up as a hobby until Dawson inspired her when she created the club. 

“It’s really relaxing, it’s really fun to do, it’s fun to make cool things,” Guerrero said. 

Guerrero even goes as far as to try to not bring yarn to school until Fridays or else she gets too focused on crochet to do her homework or schoolwork. Supposedly it is a feeling felt by many of the club members. 

“I made a vest, I like making little stuffed animals, things like that,” Guerrero said. “I’m in the process of making a blanket right now, people have made scarves, hats, and I’ve made lots of beanies.” 

“You don’t have to know how to crochet or knit, most people in the club didn’t know how to crochet or knit at all. Now they’re making these incredible things that I have been impressed with. So, anyone’s welcome, it’s super relaxed, we just like to have fun,” Guerrero said.

Friday Night Live

Friday Night Live is a community service based club that works to improve our community in various ways.

“We focus on wellness, substance abuse, taking care of yourself, and making good choices,” Club President Emme Landers said.

Currently the club is working on a drunk and distracted driving activity, making a presentation for the school’s bulletin. The purpose of the presentation is to spread information and statistics about drunk and distracted driving related deaths. 

“We run the blood drives,” Landers said. “We did a tobacco awareness wall last year giving information on the tobacco industry and how it targets teens, but also along with that we had interactive activities about mental health and just taking care of yourself.” 

The club also did a public service announcement (PSA) about the recent tobacco referendum, Proposition 31. Proposition 31 put Senate Bill 793 (SB 793), which banned the sale of flavored tobacco products, back into debate. 

In their PSA, Friday Night Live spoke on the dangers of flavored tobacco and its effects on teens. 

“If you’re interested in making a difference in the small ways and helping your community out, we focus on a lot of that. Our idea is that youth can make a difference in things whether it’s in advocacy or health-wise,” Landers said.