Freshmen are not given the choice to take Leadership as a class and have felt rushed into things when taking on roles, such as class officers.

For several years, Leadership has been offered to sophomores, juniors and seniors, but not freshmen. Leslie With, the activities director, spoke about the difficulty of incorporating freshmen into Leadership because of the 17 feeder middle schools they would have to reach out to in order to recruit incoming freshmen. 

“We had so many [schools], we wanted them to come in and not be like, ‘Oh we get all of these kids from one school, but we’ve got 16 other schools.’ Why are we not mixing?” With said. “That was originally the big reason for [this restriction] because there was [also] an application process.”

Another inconvenience is with class officer elections. There is a leadership class that consists of all of the officers from each grade level, except for freshmen. Freshmen are encouraged to run for these positions; however, With expressed that having to change the schedules of freshmen who are interested in taking Leadership and being in that class with all of the other officers would not be ideal. 

“We have a Leadership government class that has all the elected officers in it,” With said. “So [you would] think, ‘Okay, we’ll put freshmen there,’ but again how do we put the freshmen there? We can’t change their schedules three to four weeks into the school year.”

During homecoming, this appeared to be a difficult situation for freshman class president Charlotte Westervelt. 

“It’s been kind of hard because when we were doing homecoming stuff we had to pass out t-shirts and decorate,” Westervelt said. “We couldn’t use that period because we had another class. We had to skip one of our classes to do something and it’s [put] us at a disadvantage.”

With said that there have not been any freshmen who have approached her about making a freshman Leadership class, but she isn’t opposed to the idea if anyone brings it up. One piece of advice that With has for freshmen interested in taking Leadership their sophomore year is to try and be as involved as possible.

“Definitely attend [the] class board meetings and find ways to be involved with your class,” With said. “The students involved in leadership work on the skills of organization [and] time management, but it’s also about promotion [and] being involved.”