Keeping in Touch Despite Remaining Distanced: Student Government Works to Maintain School Spirit Through the Screen

On March 13, 2020, the first official quarantine regarding COVID-19 began and is still in effect. Despite the newer changes students are still required to social distance when it comes to learning, by attending school through Zoom, a video conferencing platform that helps students and teachers communicate and provides a safer learning environment. 

Many important dates and events such as SAR (Sports-A-Rama), the graduation of the class of 2020, Prom 2020. This created a worrisome mindset for students, teachers, other staff, and parents. 

However, despite the situation and worries regarding last spring semester, the Student Government has tried their best to control the situation by coming up with plans that will help students and teachers stay positive while remaining at home learning or teaching from a computer.

Student Government Representative Hiba Abdullah, who joined Student Government in the fall of 2020, has many ideas regarding possible positive changes for the Mira Loma community.

Hiba believes that she will bring a change that will allow everyone to speak up and share their ideas including the timid and the Special Ed students. She says, “all voices matter and they are valuable and precious”. She also says, “I want to motivate others to chase their dreams and goals and to reach it no matter how ‘unrealistic’ it may sound to others”. As a newer Student Government member, Abdullah desires to spread kindness and positivity by creating more activities in a virtual fashion that will motivate students, such as game nights which were a big success last semester. When it comes to Abdullah’s level of comfort regarding social distancing she states, “ I get overwhelmed sometimes, get anxious and frustrated with the loads of work that comes my way because it can be a handful sometimes just looking at a computer screen all day and doing work 24/7 5-6 days a week, it gets tiring sometimes. But, my loved ones keep me motivated and persistent and the kindness I see from the ML community gives me hope in our world because the good can outweigh the bad in our world”. Abdullah and the Student Government as a whole have been encouraging challenges regarding events, figuring out ideas involving school spirit, and different themes for each season especially since communicating with each other and the school community has been difficult. 

Some of the plans or ideas for the remainder of the year are Gaming tournaments, (shout out to Toby Gaudreau for the idea), Homecoming themes, the annual “More Love Less Hate” rally, SAR, dances (only if students return to in-person learning), game nights, Spirit weeks,  “Movie Trivia”, which will be an event (via zoom), where students will be put to the test by assessing their knowledge of various movies asking numerous questions about the context, reenacting different scenes, and describing multiple characters seeing how well they know the movie. 

Another important idea is the “Corona can’t” movement, an upcoming video by Abdullah. She says “Corona Can’t is a movement founded by a high school educator in Florida who wanted to spread a good message among the students and staff members. It will consist of video clips of different people starting their sentence with, ‘Corona Can’t…’, and then they say what corona has not stopped them from doing. Then, they will demonstrate it in the video. A simple video like this is a friendly reminder to show that the good can outweigh the bad. Nothing can stop us, we are stronger than we believe in the situation”. Abdullah also states that there will be “Emotional or therapy meetings” where students can speak about their circumstance and feel heard, that can be very beneficial for the student community. 

Hiba Abdullah’s message for the Mira Loma community regarding the current situation is “Be there for each other, appreciate one another, support each other – don’t let people get to you – do what makes you happy, take the positive road – check up on people and make them feel wanted”.  

Originally, this article stated that “Corona Can’t” was a movement in which people discussed what Covid successfully stopped them from doing. However, “Corona Can’t” actually celebrates what Covid has not stopped. The article has been edited to reflect this fact.