As a sophomore, one of the honors that I have had here at Mill Valley is being a part of SLT. For those who don’t know what this team is, it’s a group of students and teachers who get together about twice a month and we plan out activities or projects that help create a more friendly and spirit driven environment around the school. In fact, SLT created the Class Cup competition which has been a great way to support school spirit by pitting us against each other. It’s all a friendly competition, yes?

However, after participating in SLT for about a year now there’s one thing that I’ve noticed. There doesn’t seem to be any drive to actually enforce the ideas that we come up with in our bi-weekly meetings.

One example of this is the fact that we didn’t exactly accomplish anything in the first semester. I am a part of the student-teacher relations group within SLT and one of our main responsibilities is picking the teacher of the month.

We’ve talked about teacher of the month since the very first meeting with SLT, back in the first quarter. When did we finally succeed at picking the teacher(s) of the month? Sometime during the week of Jan. 12 and we had to pick three teachers because we didn’t do any the first semester.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I was excited to get this thing going. It’s just a matter of how late we did it. This goes for SLT as a whole. Not only did we, student-teacher relations, procrastinate our duties, but so have other groups that make up SLT. We go over what we want to accomplish in our meetings, yet it seems nothing actually gets done.

Another example that I recall from first semester is the fundraiser for the exclusively-water-bottle fountains for each class hallway. Now water-bottle carriers wouldn’t have to wait in line to fill up.

Unfortunately, we didn’t even raise over $100. To put this into perspective, we have just upwards of 1,300 students and each water-bottle fountain would have cost us approximately $400-$500. So, if every single student were to bring in $1 or 2, every class hall would have a fountain.

I understand that now, in second semester, we’re starting to get a little bit more done, but that entire first semester is gone with what contributions from SLT? It’s a great group and it produces phenomenal results when we actually try. We could actually accomplish something if we set monthly goals and had incentives to get SLT to do something big and fun for Mill Valley. As a body of students that want to create a positive and fun environment for everyone, we need to have the drive and ambition to actually accomplish our goals.