For the past year, Norwalk Student Council members have had the opportunity to go to other schools and learn what they do differently from Norwalk. They have also been able to invite students from other schools to show how Norwalk is. These opportunities are called exchanges, and Ryan Alfred, Norwalk Student Council’s admin, said there were various reasons why we do it.
“We want to learn new ideas from other student councils so we can implement them for our student council,” Alfred said. “You get a feel of what other school policies are.”
Alfred said there were multiple examples of different policies.
“[For example,] whether or not that school allows cell phones, are they required to show an ID to get into the building, do they have block scheduling versus normal scheduling,” he said. “Those are all things you can look at and students can come and advocate for what they want their school to look like too.”
He also said that they want to make some changes to the student council because of the exchanges.
“In the future, we’re going to look at a system for student council where we track what students do better,” Alfred said. “Try to make sure that they’re coming to meetings and they’re participating in events. That’s a system we learned from Winterset that we’re trying to implement.”
Sophomore Samory Monds was a student from Winterset who came to Norwalk for the exchange. Monds said they had similar reasons to Norwalk as to why they do these exchanges.
“We so often wonder how we can better our school and student council, and the exchange helped with that and gave us ideas,” he said.
Monds said there were things he liked about Norwalk.
“I liked how Norwalk had a bigger school and how they had weighted and unweighted grades,” he said. “[I also liked] how many classes they offered.”
Monds pointed out the differences between Norwalk and Winterset.
“Winterset has a four-block schedule and Norwalk has nine classes,” he said. “Winterset only has an open campus for seniors but Norwalk has it for everyone.”
Senior Audrey Adams, the school’s vice president, thought that the latest exchange went well. She also said there’s a specific way students are partnered up.
“We’ll base it off our position, so the president will be paired with the president, vice president with the vice president. Just go through our executive board and pair them with people like that,” she said. “[For the Indianola exchange], we paired them based on interest. So if we had students involved with sports or choir, then they were paired with someone who had those similar interests.”
Adams said she hoped to show exchange students the good things about Norwalk.
“[I hoped] to show them how we function with a large student council and what our activities look like,” Adams said. “We’re not exactly a small town anymore… [getting] to show the other different ways we get the community involved through our school.”
