The transition from middle school to high school is challenging, especially for nervous, incoming freshman. Link crew is a way to help these students on the first day of classes. They also hold activities during seminar to help get to know a certain group of people and help form a bond with the students. A few days before the school year starts, freshmen get a call from their link leader.
“One of my old band directors told me that the audience only remembers the first and last number of a performance. If you put that in high school, a student only remembers the first and last experience,” said Link Leader and junior Coleman Brockmeier. “I hope I get to be a positive first experience.”
A new feature of Link Crew is the seminar meetings. Now link leaders lead group activities in seminars to help students, which are from all different grades, get to know each other in class.
“Link Crew really serves as two purposes now,” said Link Crew advisor Hannah Pence. “The initial intent when we started Link Crew was to help with freshmen orientation to help freshmen ease that transition from middle school to high school. It’s now the seminar responsibilities of being an in-seminar class leader and helping that seminar get to know each other.”
Link crew has about 100 members on it. To be on Link Crew, students must be either a responsible junior or senior, have interest in the East community and be a good role model.
New to the 2016-2017 school year, seminar teachers will appoint students to be on link crew instead of students applying
“We like to get a variety of different types of students in the Link Leader program to show that there’s different types of people who do different activities,” said Pence. “We don’t want all the Link Leaders to be alike.”