Current Menlo Co-Presidents Sophie Reynolds, Victoria Wat, and Ethan Yan; Nuntius Editor Peridot Park; future CAJCL Co-Convention Presidents Sonia Agarwal and Ahna Kim; and Mrs. Vasquez conferenced via Google Meet. We are trying to figure out how we can stay engaged with the Redwood City family house given the shelter-in-place orders; Mrs. Vasquez asked if we could at least try to ship some materials to them. Sonia will do some research as to whether this is possible. Mrs. Vasquez thinks that the Lorica should be repurposed as a tool to reach Menlo JCLers and provide forms of entertainment in the form of puzzles, sudokus, etc. Peridot will begin thinking about how to achieve this objective.
We then began discussing what different roles to assign Menlo students for State Convention 2021, cognizant of sports commitments in lacrosse, Mock Trial, etc. There was a discussion about Agora and informing people ahead of time so that they have time to prepare. Additionally, we discussed which sports we wanted to have and concluded that it might be better to have Menlo-related individuals (as opposed to SCLers) be in charge of tennis and swimming. Given the historically low turnout for soccer (partially because of the shin guard requirement), we decided to eliminate that and allow soccer-interested individuals to instead use their talents in bubble soccer. We also decided to eliminate the piano competition due to inconsistency in judging and fold it into That’s Entertainment. Ethan suggested that the individuals who are working with academic testing could also be involved in awards. Mrs. Vasquez suggested that Sonia’s mother might be a good fit for coordinating parent volunteers (and Sonia agreed).
In terms of volunteers, there was a discussion of how to further recruit them; Ethan suggested finding a way to attach community engagement credits to volunteers while Mrs. Vasquez said that Mr. Lapolla would give teachers credit for being involved as well. Mrs. Vasquez will also begin looking for a potential date for the State Convention. In terms of scheduling, Victoria suggested scheduling events to overlap, as individuals rarely stay for the entire duration of activities. Ethan suggested involving other local schools in the running of convention activities such as pre-convention, Kahoot, escape room, etc. Possible suggestions for partner schools include Harker, Menlo-Atherton, and Live Oak. There was a discussion about potential new activities such as virtual reality, mini golf, or laser tag; we will research further into these possibilities. Ethan said that we need to pay special attention to the needs of middle schoolers and to start brainstorming new ideas, given that we hosted recently. Overall, we created a preliminary draft of the numbers of people we need to oversee each task. One important note is that we probably will need a technology czar who will oversee all technology-related needs beforehand and respond to challenges the day of. Also, Ethan mentioned working with non-Menlo members of the CAJCL Board, for example with the Tech Challenge, taking advantage of their interests and talents. In terms of next steps, Sonia will create a document with blurbs describing all the tasks, in preparation to send out to students for signing up.
Menlo JCL 