Over the years, Mt. Greylock has seen the successes and failures of myriad extracurricular clubs. As the new school year gets under way, many clubs, old and new, are looking to organize themselves quickly and establish a presence in the community. An initial prerequisite for each club is a staff liaison. The first task of many clubs’ student leaders this year was to sign on faculty members to the job. Latin teacher Amy Turner has volunteered to help with the Gay-Straight Alliance, a club that did not see a great deal of activity in the last couple years. She expressed her hopes for the upcoming year. “I am completely new to this position so I’m going to hopefully be learning along with the active members,” she said, “but I would really like to get GSA out of ‘limbo.’ There are opportunities to be more active at the state level, so I’d like to explore that and just to be a bigger presence in the school in general.”

Numbers is another key issue for all clubs, director of co-urcurricular activities Lindsey Von Holtz pointed out. “Our goal is to have at least ten active participants in each club,” she said. She detailed the problems clubs face in enlisting members and keeping a steady level of activity: “It’s totally based on interest. There are some clubs that strive for many years and then suddenly the student body isn’t quite as interested in them because [students] are all pretty busy and there are only so many things [they] can do. And with the expectation that [club members] are to attend club meetings, a lot of students have to choose which ones they’re going to participate in and sometimes during a sports season or in the middle of a performance, it doesn’t happen as much.”

On Friday, October 18, Mt. Greylock hosted a club fair outside the cafeteria during both lunches to help clubs recruit new members. Youth Environmental Squad student leader Noah Savage said “[his] goals going into the fair were to get access to social groups of the school [he] wouldn’t normally be in contact with.” By the end of the fair, he managed to sign on ten to fifteen students. While he was quite enthusiastic about the club’s prospects, he also made clear that the numbers can also be deceptive. “Any sign-up you have, a lot of the names just aren’t going to come back. It isn’t particularly the club fair, but I think a lot of people are just interested and might not end up fully committing to stuff,” he said. Overall however, Savage was very content with the club fair’s results: “It went well and I think a lot of clubs will have gotten new people.”