On April 2, Upper Arlington High School hosted Dr. Laurie Santos, a professor at Yale University. This event was the inaugural event of a new speaker series taking place at UAHS.
The idea for this speaker series originated with the Fosters, a local family looking for ways to make their mark on Upper Arlington.
“The idea really started with the Foster family wanting to bring a new program opportunity to Upper Arlington High School–something that would involve a lot of leadership opportunities for the students and would also reach into the community,” Ellen Erlanger, an educational consultant for UA schools and a friend of the Foster family, said. “They wanted for any new program that they created to carry with it some additional leadership opportunities for the students, and they wanted this to be student-led.”
Erlanger and her colleague Kathy Meyer have been volunteering to help with the new speaker series.
In order to implement their idea, the Foster family gave a grant to UA schools out of a fund that the family had established. The program is led by UAHS teachers Alicia Mcginty and Melissa Hasebrook. Starting last summer, they began to reach out to students to involve them in the program.
“We just gathered a bunch of students from class officers, student council, a couple of other places, and we invited them to come over the summer and help us brainstorm,” Hasebrook said.
A lot of students were interested in participating, and they ended up with a large group of student leaders working on the program. Around the start of the school year, the group conducted surveys to determine what kinds of speakers students were interested in.
“They put out a survey to the student body, which also got a very good response,” Erlanger said. “The involvement of the students in really zeroing in on the ideas that they wanna emphasize and the type of people that they wanna bring to the community, it has indeed been very student-led.”
After conducting the surveys, the students identified three recurring themes that students were interested in. The first theme was mental and physical wellness, which was the theme Santos represented.
“When we started school, we came up with a topic, which is mental and physical health, and we started thinking, we brought in some names, we started doing stuff to get those names, and we ended up getting Laurie Santos from a couple of staff members and a couple of students,” junior Sarah Snider, one of the student leaders involved in the speaker series said. “One of four students take her class at Yale, so she’s really big, and she’s really cool. [She talks] about happiness and how it affects our life [and] how we can be happier in what we do.”
Santos’ course about the psychology of happiness is the most popular class at Yale.
The other two themes identified were business and entrepreneurship and social justice.
“Business and entrepreneurship, but we’re looking at it with an eye toward companies that are trying to make a difference in the world, [so] companies that are trying to make a profit while also helping others along the way,” Hasebrook said. “[Social justice is] basically the idea of service and kind of a service learning element looking at the world around us.”
Moving forward, those in charge of the program plan to increase the number of events to at least two a year.
“We’re thinking that, in the fall, it will continue the physical and mental health and wellness piece, and then, in the spring, it’ll pick up business and entrepreneurship, but, again, that’s dependent on speaker availability,” Hasebrook said.
They also plan to incorporate future speakers into teachers’ curriculums.
“There hasn’t been as much time to work on the curriculum connections as there will be in the future,” Erlanger said. “I know that there are some people that are doing things in the classroom to reinforce the learning and make it stronger.”
Those responsible for this speaker program hope to see it benefit the community and facilitate the creation of new student leaders at UAHS.
“The Foster family wanted to contribute something new to student life at Upper Arlington High School that would also benefit the community,” Erlanger said. “They saw an opportunity to strengthen student leadership opportunities.”
Students have taken advantage of these opportunities and are excited to leave their mark at UAHS.
“This is something that can be our legacy at Upper Arlington,” Snider said.