Thank you to everyone coming to our second town hall we held on Wednesday, January 13 during lunch & advocacy. The notes and link to the meeting recording can be found in the document below.
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Thank you to everyone coming to our second town hall we held on Wednesday, November 4 during lunch & advocacy. The notes and link to the meeting recording can be found in the document below. One of the ways StuCo works towards connecting the school community is acting as a voice of students to admins. HSPVA Student Council and HSPVSA National Honor Society collaborated to plan HSPVA's first Student & Admin Town Hall of the year on Wednesday, September 23 during lunch & advocacy. These town halls will be held monthly over teams and function as a change for students to directly communicate with admins to ask questions and raise concerns about the school. These are the notes from the first meeting. To join the next meeting to listen or make your voice heard, stay tuned to the StuCo & NHS Instagrams! It’s a new year for PVA, a new school for our incoming students, and a new chapter for Student Council. Student Council members, National Honor Society members, Senior Ambassadors, and department student leaders worked together to plan and lead a four-day virtual Artist Academy!
Freshmen students were introduced to the place they would spend the next four years of their lives with the help of their upperclassmen peers, who each took on a role to make the new PVA artists feel as welcome as possible. They were divided into small groups named after PVA alumni, where they were able to talk, participate in games and icebreakers, and get to know 10-15 other students more personally. What started off as a quiet Teams call ended with exciting and interactive conversations between people who seemed like they’ve been friends for a long time. So to all of our current PVA students: remember to continue supporting this amazing new group coming in. And to those new PVA students: buckle up! You’re in for a great high school career. Remember, if you want to take school involvement to the next level, head on over to the “Apply” tab and submit an application by October 2nd. As we head into a school year unique in its challenges but brimming with potential for resilience, creativity, and new ideas, we wanted to take a moment to remember Student Council’s awesome projects this past year. We’re so excited to start another great year and welcome more incredible PVA students to StuCo! If being part of the team sounds like something you’d love to do then check out the “Apply” tab to submit an application! Without further ado, let’s take a trip down StuCo memory lane… FALL
StuCo isn’t limited to HSPVA-related activities though--every year the club is involved in community outreach. We started out with a StuCo Bake Sale to raise money for the Houston Migrant Justice Rally in early September. Houstonians for Migrant Justice calls for transparency and accountability within migration agencies and is committed to humanitarian care, timely reunification, prevention of mistreatment, and just legal representation for migrants taking shelter in the Greater Houston community. StuCo’s second charity initiative was an online fundraising page for the Thirst Project. This is the second time StuCo has collaborated with this international nonprofit organization that works towards ending the global water crisis afflicting 663 million people worldwide who do not have access to clean water. Although the fundraising was cut short by the pandemic, Student Council managed to raise over $800! During HSPVA’s iconic Halloweek, StuCo organized a spirit week leading up to the Halloween Happening and other Spook-tivities! Students showed their school spirit by dressing up for Meme Day, Pajama Day, Blue Out, Twin Day, and Teacher Roast day. Students showed off their looks through Students Council’s Instagram, where fun collages can be found displaying the coolest looks from the week! We finished off the week's festivities with a Halloween Spirit Night at Dairy Ashford Roller Rink. Students skated the night away, and all proceeds were directly donated to the Thirst Project. Check out the Student Council Instagram page for pictures and some ICONIC looks from HSPVA’s Halloween week! WINTER
SPRINGSince in-person school was cancelled due to the pandemic, so was Sports Week. But that didn’t stop StuCo from planning a week of fun through HSPVA Virtual Challenges, a series of daily Instagram Story challenges for students to connect and share their favorite PVA experiences. Challenges included one thing you miss about PVA, favorite teacher moment, favorite PVA photo, overheads at home, and favorite art area photo. We celebrated the end of the week and the beginning of Asian-Pacific Heritage Month with an HSPVA Netflix Party viewing of “The Half of It.” Students across grades and departments at PVA submitted videos of themselves keeping busy during quarantine to be made into a fun motivational video from Student Council. The HSPVA Empowers video was set to an original song written by StuCo member Ian Dessauer and sung by Sarah-Grace, also a StuCo member, along with lyrics written by Zach Llyod. Yet another example of PVA students using their talents to lift spirits during the pandemic. You can watch the video HERE on the @hspvastudentcouncil Instagram. Due to moving online, students were sadly not around each other every day pushing each other and inspiring each other artistically. We wanted to keep the HSPVA community inspired and working on their art. We created a virtual masterclass series featuring each art area. Each masterclass video was created to teach a little bit about their art area and keep the student body engaged during quarantine. The videos were posted to the Kinder HSPVA YouTube channel, so CLICK HERE to view the playlist and learn something from other art areas! Last but not least, check out our video below inspired by our fellow (fictional) performing arts school, Hollywood Arts from Victorious. We hope it makes you smile and gives you a taste of the fun we have at PVA and in Student Council! Since the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, there’s been a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. People have been reevaluating racism’s role in their lives, from microaggressions in their daily encounters with People of Color to the systemic problems in education, government, etc. As students of a school that pledges to accept people from all backgrounds, we want to cultivate an environment that both addresses the racism that isn’t exempt from our community AND commits itself to fixing it. This is where you come in: we’re creating a video that we hope to present to the faculty and staff of our beloved school so that every single one of us can become better allies for people of color. If you haven't seen Mr. Klein's recent email and the plans for this video to play at a live streamed discussion featuring a student panel and Dr. Allen, scroll down to the bottom to read it. We need video submission from you, the current (Class of '21-'23) students of Kinder HSPVA, answering the question: “How has race affected your experience at PVA?” We need responses from everyone, people of ALL races, grade levels, and art areas. Here are some ground rules:
We need YOUR help to make PVA a better place! Students,
As we count down the days to the virtual beginning of the school year, the administration team at HSPVA is following up on Dr. Allen’s pledge to create a campus where all of our students feel included, respected, and valued. On Thursday, September 3 at 6 pm, we will be hosting a live streamed discussion featuring a student panel and Dr. Allen. Kyra Hardwick, a current parent and chair of the HSPVA PTO Black Legacy of the Arts committee, will be moderating the event. We are looking for students to serve as panelists for the event. We hope the panelists represent all art areas in grades 10-12 and are willing to share experiences at PVA around race and culture. If you are interested in participating, complete the short survey at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3QCY6ZB The deadline for applications is Tuesday, August 18. Because the panel has a limited amount of spaces, we have also asked our Student Council to produce a video featuring student voices that will be shared during the event. Stay tuned to StuCo’s Instagram account on how to participate. If you ever have a specific issue that you want to share with a member of the administration, please do not hesitate to do so. (This email distribution list was compiled from last year’s student survey. Please share this with your classmates who may not have received this.) Jonathan Klein Magnet Coordinator Cupid is here, and he looks an awful lot like Student Council members. Buy a candy gram for your sweetheart or sweet friends for $1! On Valentine's day, Student Council officers will deliver your candy gram during advocacy.
Make a wish every time Adam Tawakkol is in a picture. The (happy and relieved the event was going well) officers! Adam Tawakkol, Treasurer; Sophie Cardenas, Secretary; Elena Margolin, Artistic Director; Cathleen Freedman, President; Ashlyn Williams, Vice-President; Nicholas Wesley, Underclassmen Representative. Pictured left: Sr. Alarcon, our Student Council sponsor. Thank you for everything! He was the biggest star of all on this starry night. Thank you to our sponsors!
Bernosky Construction Jason Medley, Attorney-At-Law Kolache Factory Tanya J Bennett, MD, PLLC The Clarke Family The Freedman Family The Kalmans Family The Kidd Family Kris and Jennifer Reeves McKenna Financial Michael and Rhonda Pelton The Kirk Family The Sternenberg Family Jodi and Larry Zwang The Klein Family The Walther-Broussard Family Student Council members have been working on the ball since...the beginning of the 2017-2018 school year. Naturally, members would be working until the ball began. Pictured above: Cathleen Freedman sweeping the commons. Bethany Lin adjusting table pieces. One hour before the dance. Four days before the ball: Student Council members (and some NHS members who helped! Thank you!) strung the stars that would be put on the commons ceiling. This took three days after school, staying until 8:30 Monday night, 7:30 Tuesday night, and 6:00 Wednesday night. Josh Foreman, with all of the stars he hung. You see those stars? Yep, he hung those. Elena Margolin's Winter Ball design plan The stars in the commons were called "Cathleen stars" and "Bethany stars". Some of the stars were Cathleen's; some of the stars were found at Ikea for a spectacular deal by Bethany. Hence, the names. Also, the cut out 2D stars were called "Alexa stars" after member Alexa Halim, who showed members how to make the stars. Pictured above is Bethany's design for the commons. This was in December. We didn't think we could pull it off!
This event featured acts from every art department. All proceeds benefited Red Cross relief in Puerto Rico. We raised over $1300.
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