Since the Student Council sponsor of 26 years Lyn Scolaro is retiring this year, Assistant Principal Frank Mirandola, Scolaro and Underground Sponsor Chris Cirrincione took the time to reexamine the system in place for leadership groups at Prospect. They saw between multiple clubs and organizations that there was a desire to plan activities and events for students and the community, but the activities ended up being very similar, leading to redundancy. 

On top of that, many students take part in numerous extracurriculars and organizations but are unable to be fully invested in all of them because the separate organizations competed for time unknowingly.  

“Even though all the groups had phenomenal intentions, we ended up working harder: not smarter,” Cirrincione said. 

The staff members sought a more efficient way of rolling out the activities for these separate groups and came to decide on creating a new organization called the Associated Student Body (ASB). This organization will be the merge of the Peppers, Student Council, all the Class Boards, the Underground, Knights’ Way, Link and Service Club under one umbrella working for one mission which is “making moments matter”. According to Mirandola, this mission is going to be guided by three core values of engaging, inclusivity and empowering.

Mirandola first heard about the idea of the Associated Student Body at a California Association of Directors of Activities conference and learned about how other schools had implemented it. 

“This student leadership organization is going to be very influential in continuing to shape, embrace and improve our culture [at Prospect],” Mirandola said. “And it’s going to happen through our teachers, collaboration between students and really harnessing student passion to make the best of their high school experience.” 

This approach is aimed to bring a more streamlined way to participate and a series of new organized events. There will be a meeting once a month for the Associated Student Body as a whole, meetings among each team accordingly and weekly meetings for the organization’s Executive Board. 

Each quarter will have its own theme. The first will be about “pride” of a Knight, the second will be “providing” service to the community and the third will be for “personal potential” to allow for students to reflect and engage in personal development. Lastly, fourth quarter will be focused on “praise” and looking back on the past year. 

“[We hope] to offer more opportunities that are exciting for the whole school, but then also connect people with something that they’re really excited about and that they can give back to the Prospect community in their own way,” Cirrincione said. 

The obstacles that Cirrincione sees is first, the fact that getting the word out about ASB is more difficult because of remote learning, and also the fact that there will be a heavier reliance on communication because of the size of the new organization.

However, the first concern was decreased because of the overwhelming results from the self-nomination surveys that were posted to Schoology. Cirrincione received 105 applications to join the ASB from students within the first hour of being posted. 

“Students have so much potential and they want to be involved … I think this will be a great [way] to excite and really develop leaders at Prospect,” Cirrincione said. “I am also really excited about bringing some new opportunities and activities during the school day to Prospect.”

Even though there will be consolidation within the groups, it will not limit student involvement or opportunity, and will in fact do the opposite. 

“One of the things that every student comes in here hearing from me, personally, is that you matter. And you matter right now,” Mirandola said. “So we want to make sure that we have leadership positions for students to know they matter and that they make an impact.”

Watch this video describing the ASB: