Mandated Club Meeting Times Questioned

By  Amy Lum and Andrea Luo

To accommodate the altered schedule, Director of Student Activities Joanne Lembo assigned meeting blocks for each club. Meeting times factored previous meeting frequencies and locations, as well as limited input from club co-heads and advisers. However, students noted that club meeting times overlap with other appointments, and many do not accommodate students learning remotely in different time zones. 

Lembo outlined the meeting requirements in an email to club leadership teams on Sep. 4. Clubs are only permitted to meet during their allotted time slot, most of which are one hour. Additionally, club advisers must be present in all meetings, remote or in-person.

Faculty member Hannah Lim highlighted the pressure placed on students with scheduling conflicts, along with those in different time zones. “Students, particularly students off-campus who are outside the [Eastern Standard] time zone, [are being] pulled in too many directions with the current schedule,” Lim said. “I’m concerned that the bulk of the burden is being placed on individual students to make difficult choices, on their own, between sleep and building/maintaining connections to PEA.” 

The schedule has also posed challenges for many students and club co-heads due to conflicting commitments. “In order to promote equity among all students in different time zones and students playing different sports, we would need to meet at times that aren’t assigned to us on the schedule,” Mock Trial co-head Alicia Gopal said.

Clubs that were given longer meeting times are all scheduled during the same time block, which Model United Nations (MUN) co-head Phil Horrigan believed has created issues for their operation. “Model UN, Debate, Mock Trial and The Exonian all overlap, which is incredibly frustrating as those clubs share a lot of members,” Horrigan said. “For recruiting preps and other new students, this is equally annoying because they are having to choose which clubs they want to join before they can experience any.”

Horrigan noted additional concerns about the overlap of club meetings and sports. “There are several elements of the schedule which preclude certain groups, specifically athletes, from engaging with the largest clubs on campus,” he said. “This fact only reinforces the stereotype that athletes don’t do clubs because it makes them totally inaccessible.”

Students also had various opinions over the decision to give certain clubs longer meeting times. “[It] makes sense. For example, The Exonian is pressured with creating the newspaper for the school. So they obviously need more time to participate. [Robotics Club is] pressured to win the state championship and set world records. So with these large competitions or these large end-goals or projects in mind, these larger clubs are given more time,” Robotics Club co-head Vincent Xiao said.

Due to various time zone differences, the new club schedule has also made it harder for international students to attend club meetings. With classes scheduled during the morning and night and clubs sandwiched in between, international students must sacrifice their sleep to attend club meetings. “For Paper Airplanes, I’m actually one of the co-heads, but the meeting is at 1:00p.m., which was 1:00a.m. for me. And also it’s on a Saturday, during the weekend, so it’s one of the only days when I can sleep early,” upper Emma Chen, who is studying remotely, said.

International student and upper Emily Wang proposed a return to the spring term schedule. “If they had class all during the day like before and not the 8p.m., they could put all the clubs and whatever a little later,” Wang said. “Then, you would do school and then wake up again for clubs later at night.”

Noting that extracurriculars play a large role in students’ lives, Lim voiced concern over the balance that students must find between school and extracurriculars. “I know Exonians pride themselves in their multifaceted passions, but I have a hard time seeing where all the time and energy can come from to be a fully present and engaged student in classes while maintaining a vibrant extracurricular club life,” Lim said. 

Kirtland Society co-head Charlie Preston called for Lembo to reverse the new club policies. “It shows the lack of trust the administration has in student leaders. Students know how to run their clubs and recognize what their members need, and it’s insulting that our administration seems to think otherwise.”