The State of the School: A Letter from our President

By David Sanchez

The 2nd trimester is infamous for being the worst time in a student’s life. The onset of snow, the loss of daylight, and the dying motivation leftover from 1st trimester make the 3+ months of school seem like an eternity. Well, I can’t do anything about any of that [especially the motivation part] but what I can do is try to provide an outlet for your frustration.
According to Mr. Murphy, “First trimester was a success.” I agree. We had a great 5-DAY Homecoming Week, huge success among all the sports teams, and a pretty smooth finals week. However, it’s not first trimester anymore, and student government is going to start doing things differently. First, we’re trying to get the green light to have parent chaperones in place of faculty chaperones. After a long week of school, what teacher wants to stay up all night at a lock in? Not many. So as long as we can get parents to volunteer their time, I foresee a number of lock ins, informal dances, movie nights etc. Here’s the thing: we basically want to plan so many events so that if you can’t attend one, it’s totally okay because there’s another happening the next week! No one enjoys focusing completely on school without a couple breaks in the winter months. And that’s where students come in, we need your ideas! So starting after break, get ready – you shout the idea, we’ll make it happen.

The State of the School: A letter from our president

The State of the School: A letter from our president
By David Sanchez, student body president


Over the summer break, the student government officers tried to invent ways to make Prairie a better place to attend school and make this school year more enjoyable. We acted on two thoughts – the first was finding a compromise on the many rules that had been enacted over the past couple of years, and the second focused on organizing a long list of social events throughout the year.

We met with Mr. McKinney early in the summer to find out why exactly these rules had been made – athletic shorts are unprofessional; pizza is bad for your health; and grinding is…well, we still don't really understand their argument for that. Anyway, we did our research, conducted surveys, and cross referenced other local school policies, and gave a presentation to the Academic Council at the beginning of the year. From all that work, we were able to get back a full spirit week and get rid of lunchroom dismissal. Whoopee! We realized that the 100% of seniors, 90% of juniors, and 92% of sophomores were right – Student Government has little/no say in how Prairie is run anymore. So we decided to turn our focus to other areas.

We’ve met a couple of time with Mr. Murphy and several parents to plan some fun activities. Money is always the issue when it comes to social events, so we decided to enter an online video contest hosted by eCompliments.com. We strategically entered with two weeks left so we could sneak up and reach 1st place right as the competition ended. We did! We took first place with 48 hours left. Unfortunately, life isn’t always fair and doesn't always go according to plan. Phil Defranco, a professional YouTuber with over 500,000 followers entered the competition on the last day and got enough votes to surpass us within a few hours. You win some, you lose some, and as Rocky says, “It’s not how hard you can hit, it’s how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” We’re going to do everything we can to make this school year a blast.