After being told over the summer of 2021 that Bellevue West doesn’t have a way to receive outside feedback from students, the school decided to start a Student Advisory Council.

“The T-Bird Advisory Council was just to give students a chance to voice to us what it is they need,” principal Kevin Rohlfs said. “If we’re going to try and make improvements, we need to hear from the students what those improvements are.”

According to dean Jason Trummer, teachers were asked to recommend three students who they thought would be good additions to the council. Ideally the council would be made of a diverse group of students. Knowing freshmen were not picked at the time, Trummer said the council is open to the idea of new additions later on.

The advisory council meets twice a month during GPS, and during each meeting, the students or staff will bring up anything they feel needs to be talked about.

“We’ll throw topics out, throw questions out, to try and see where they’re at,” Rohlfs said. “And we really want them to be able to go back to their GPS and kind of share what they’re hearing, it’s really their kind of voice for all the students.”

As well as bringing what was discussed to their GPS, Rohlfs said he would also like to see members of the council bring ideas that they have heard from their classmates into discussions.

“They shouldn’t just be bringing us things they want to see, but anything that other students are telling them as well.” Rohlfs said.

According to sophomore Ka’Maiya Hunt, they discuss things like what classes they can add or what kind of things they can do to help people who don’t fit in and a variety of other topics.

“At this point, we’ve spent some time talking about sportsmanship at games and we’ve talked about programs that they would like to see implemented in the district,” Rohlfs said.

After a topic is discussed they will figure out the best course of action. If it is something at the school level then they will come up with a decision together. Otherwise, they may send the thought to whoever is in charge of the area the idea falls under. 

According to Trummer, during the fall the council talked about the messes that were left following sports events. The solution was to provide trash bags and have some members of the Flock Squad participate in the clean up.

“Having those trash bags there just helps clean up the mess so the janitors don’t have to,” Trummer said. “Especially outside the football games, [they] don’t have to clean up those messes.”

Hunt said she would like to see the council grow and incorporate more people’s ideas and mindsets as well as see everyone cooperate well as a group. Rohlfs said he has similar goals that include the group becoming more comfortable sharing their thoughts. 

“I hope they get to the point where they can just be brutally honest,” Rohlfs said. “Because if there’s things we have to fix, we need to know about it.  So we’re very open to hearing whatever it is they want to share with us.”