Showcasing their progress in implementing proposed changes from previous Summits in the 2023-2024 school year, OA RSVP (Raising Student Voice and Participation) will kick off its third and final Summit on Feb. 21.
At the first Summit held on Sept. 20, 2023, RSVP helped students in each homeroom brainstorm which social, facility, and community aspects of Oxford were most in need of change. Afterwards, RSVP members and club leaders organized the students’ responses and selected reasonable yet crucial issues to target at Summit #2 on Nov. 15, 2023, during which students discussed and shared realistic approaches to tackle each of them. So far, RSVP believes they have successfully executed each Summit.
“This year, I feel that summits have been progressing efficiently,” said RSVP President and Student Ambassador Marcus Kwon. “And as a result, we’ve been able to streamline the process of summits.”
RSVP is divided into three issue-oriented committees within the club: the social, facility, and community committees. After the second summit, each committee has been working on addressing the changes and implementation methods as proposed by students.
The social committee, led by freshman Kate Park, is concentrating on clarifying Oxford’s dress code for students, as many expressed the difficulty in distinguishing what they can wear to school from what they cannot. The community committee, led by senior Kaylin Chan and freshman Yuri Yamachika, is working to make internship resources more accessible for students, a few ideas of implementation being to increase publicity about opportunities through email, the OA website, and so on, and to create a single resource page of information specific to internships. The facilities committee, led by senior Thien-An Do, received “a significant number of concerns regarding bathroom cleanliness and lunch line efficiency,” he says. In response, the committee plans on implementing a QR code system where individuals can note issues with bathroom maintenance, and continues to tackle lunch line time.
Despite RSVP’s dedication to efficiently implementing change, they face a complicated and extensive process of gathering student voices and then advocating these changes to school administrators. Nonetheless, RSVP takes one step at a time to ensure there is progress being made, though these may not be visible right away. Behind-the-scenes efforts have allowed for RSVP’s past successes of permission to wear jeans every Friday and on school spirit weeks, more vegetarian lunch options, solar-powered charging lunch tables, and water bottle refill stations.
Moving forward, RSVP plans to take initiative towards implementing the concerns and solutions brought forth at Summit.
“I hope that RSVP can take a more active role in making changes on campus,” says Do. “I think that making sure to be transparent with all that RSVP does on campus is really important.”
Students of all grades are welcome to join RSVP at their bi-monthly Monday lunch meetings in the MPR.
