Thank you for the baby gift poem

Awards Night

During my first year as a student council adviser, I was invited to a sports banquet. As I sat there listening to the coach extol the virtues of each individual player, I thought, "why isn't there one of these nights for student council, the most underappreciated group of students in the school?"

Hastily, I planned a quick banquet on a shoestring budget. Because a few of my council members were from low-income families, I decided against a buy-a-plate dinner and planned a simple dessert night in the school cafeteria. What started as an effort to just give the kids a few pats on the back became a yearly tradition in which my teaching partner and I see how much fun, laughter, and tears we can pack into one evening. It was our chance to show off our skills at organizing an event!

Planning an end-of-the-year student government awards night puts the ultimate finishing touches onto a year and my teaching partner and I found that it actually reinvigorates us and gets us excited about our jobs when we would normally be feeling a tremendous amount of burnout.

Before the year starts we reserve an evening at the end of May on the school activity calendar. We like to go after our own All School Awards Night and Athletic Awards Night. As the year progresses we start a search for the perfect children's book that captures challenges, goals, or particular feelings of the year. Over the years, we have used such books as The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister to illustrate how members of a brand new student council program learned how to share themselves and their enthusiasm. The Return of Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister fit for the kids who kept the vision of the previous year and took it to the next level. Last year, we chose The Carrot seed by Ruth Krauss because we were very unsure of the direction our group would take, but we had faith in them and they won people over, including us, with their unrivaled perseverance.

The book determines the theme of the evening, from the dessert we serve, to the decorations on the table, to the memento we send the students away with to remember the night. With our theme in hand, we usually get online with Oriental Trading Company and purchase some easy table decorations that the students and family can keep. We also pick an item such as a keychain, pen, or candle to send home with each student.

For example, last year when we used The Carrot seed as our theme, we had bubble gum carrots on the table, watering can candles as centerpieces, and we gave away beaded carrot keychains. We always like to serve a quick dessert as parents are filtering in to give us a chance to get reacquainted with them and in some cases introduced for the first time-last year we served carrot cake, of course.

To make sure the parents and students attend our special evening, we start announcing the date in student council meetings two months in advance. We send personal invitations home with the kids about three weeks in advance. We make the invitations in color and have the theme cleverly disguised-like tiny carrots as a border. Because we host the evening in the cafeteria and have plenty of space, we invite the students' family and friends with no limit to the number of guests.

We also print out a color program for the evening with the theme on the front and each student's name listed on the inside with his or her respective office. In this program, we include an acknowledgment page where we write thank-you messages to every person who is not in student council because we sometimes forget to mention them during the course of the evening.

The best part of the evening is the program itself, where we discuss each student's personal highlights. Before we start, we always read the chosen children's book and discuss its meaning; then we give it away as a gift to our current student body president. We write all of the speeches about each student well in advance so that we make sure everyone has relatively equal air time.

In addition to their student council or leadership letter and pin, we give them a certificate that we design ourselves. These certificates are comprised of not only their names, but sometimes a list of the events that they hosted, and we always include powerful words that we would use to describe them. In some years we pick three words such as fun-loving, compassionate, sincere. Last year we decided to pick just one word to describe each student's own personal leadership style, similar to a retreat activity that we did earlier in the year. We had such words as metamorphasis, classy, courage, humor, outspoken, risk-taker, kindness, and pride.

During the program, each class adviser also presents a pin to each of their officers and says something about each individual as well as all the other students who were helpful to them.

Before closing the evening with a final slide show or video of the year, we take one moment that we initially intended for the parents, but it seems to have captured the kids just as strongly, called the "tear-jerker" moment. Two years t ago, I wrote to the parents in March and asked them to send me baby pictures of their student. I scanned the photos and made them into a PowerPoint presentation. I played the PowerPoint while reading a letter written for my son (age 3) when he graduates from high school. Last year, I wrote a poem that used all of the words on the certificates and added personal stories of each student's childhood called "Where has my baby gone?" The parents (myself included) are usually reduced to a blithering mess when this is over, so we just continue to weep during the final slide show.

The most amazing part of hosting this special evening is that most of the parents come up to us and are stunned at how well we know their children and how much we have connected with them over the past year(s). I usually think to myself, "That is exactly the reason that I do this job!"

Holly Young (hyoung@washoe.k12.nv.us) is student council adviser at Reed HS in Sparks, NV.