By Sarah Hall
Editor
Kids at Gillette Road Middle School will have more of an opportunity to be heard in the 2018-19 school year. Principal Chris Leahey is forming a new Principal’s Cabinet, which will give students face time with him to raise any schoolwide issues they’d like addressed.
“It’s to really listen to students,” Leahey said. “It could be anything from concerns with bullying, with the use of technology, with programming, school lunches, any of those things. Not necessarily negative stuff, not necessarily positives. It could be one or the other.”
Leahey said he wanted to be able to directly interface with his students, but he also wanted to give them a chance to take on more authority within the school.
‘[I wanted] to challenge them to kind of take a leadership role in the building and see what we can create together, what kind of projects we could do,” he said. “We’ll really be geared on improving the building, strengthening our community and supporting each other, making Gillette a great place to be.”
Leahey said he’s hoping kids will come to him with their ideas about what’s working at Gillette, as well as what’s not. If they have a program they’d like to implement, he’ll help them through the process of doing so.
“For example, we had a student last year and they wanted to do a homework club. So I had them make a proposal, we discussed the proposal, and then we talked about some of the tangibles,” he said. “When is this going to happen? Who’s going to sponsor this, in terms of an adult? Where is it going to happen? How do we solicit students who are interested? How do we determine who’s a good fit for this program?”
Leahey said similar proposals this year would go before the building planning team and even the board of education, if they’re found to be workable for the school.
“I think the idea is for them to get some experience of how to create positive change,” he said.
Leahey said he’s looking to recruit about 15 students from each grade level, so a total of 45 kids. He said the first meeting will be in late September, with future meetings once a month. He’s hopeful that giving kids the tools to do something positive will give them not only leadership skills, but pride in their work — and a positive outlook that they can carry forward.
“Sometimes, I think we live in a climate where people give up and they become cynical, or people become more critical and negative. When there’s opportunities there, we just don’t always walk through. We don’t take the time to really walk through the processes in the avenues that are available to us to create something new,” he said. ‘So that’s my hope for these students, is that we can do that together and then they can create a program that has a positive impact on the building and supports their peers, and be proud of that.”