“Reaffirming Our Overlake Values”: Will Our Voices Be Heard?

This past week, Overlake participated in a “Reaffirming Our Values” Seminar. The idea of sitting down for two hours and talking about various values may seem tedious to some students, but lots of Overlakers found significance in the exercise.

Seniors Allie Kelly and Emily Angiulo say that the Values Seminar felt like a comfortable place to “start new conversations about the possible weaknesses of our community moving forward.” Many students challenged our current mission statement to “Inspire excellence, Develop intellectual curiosity, Teach responsibility, Embrace diversity, and Foster a compassionate community” by asking important questions like:

Is inspiring excellence even productive, or is it detrimental by creating an overwhelmingly competitive community? And should creativity be confined to the arts and humanities, or should Overlake actively pursue bringing these values to STEM classes as well?

When Allie reflected on the seminar, she stated, “I thought it was interesting, especially in my grade because we have a lot of opinions because we’re seniors, and we definitely had a lot of critiques, but I definitely thought that people felt really comfortable giving those critiques in this forum.”

Some students, however, were frustrated by the lack of choice in the values discussed.

The 10 values presented to the students were espoused by the faculty and staff during their own Values Seminar last spring. To some students, the presentation of the seminar seemed one-sided, and they were upset that only one out of the 11 groups were able to discuss which values were missing from Overlake’s community.

As John Boland in 7th grade said, “It was just ‘try to define this word’ and we were assigned certain values.”

For some, the Values Seminar seemed to be an artificial, rather than a genuine, push from the staff to get feedback from the student body.

When the Weekly Hoot asked students if they believed that the faculty and staff would listen to their opinions, many of them said no.

While the majority of the students interviewed were not optimistic, so far, the administration has proved to be enthusiastic about the results that the Values Seminar may bring.

Meghan Waddle has provided us with the 11th values each grade chose. 12th grade’s was connection. 11th grade was empathy and health. 10th grade’s was grit. 9th grade’s was confidence. 8th grade’s was leadership. 7th grade’s was loyalty. 6th grade’s was service. 5th grade did not do this activity.

As the year moves forward, students are anxious to see to what extent their voices will be heard on campus. The Weekly Hoot will be here to report on that.