Inspired by an absence of textbooks, broken clocks, foul bathroom conditions, and a lack of school spirit, sophomore Isabel Olson spearheaded the Education Enhancement Club, which held its first interest meeting on March 5. This club, which is Grady’s newest, aims to improve the academics, resources, and facilities at Grady through student-faculty cooperation.

Olson started the Education Enhancement Club with sophomores Reilly Blum and Jordan Schuster after noticing many things at Grady that she believes can use improvement.

The club was inspired by the Activism Club, a club that Olson’s brother Lucas started when he was a student at Grady.

This club differs from the Activism Club because, while they both were created to improve their community, the Education Enhancement Club will focus on issues at Grady.

The Education Enhancement Club is co-sponsored by astronomy teacher Ben Sellers and literature teacher Nalin Needham.

“I hope to provide [the club members] with guidance through the process and I hope to empower them as much as possible to allow for those changes or enhancements to occur,” Needham wrote in an e-mail.

Right now, the club’s goals include improving the school’s academics, facilities, and resources. The club hopes to encourage students to take advantage of the College and Career Center in order to better prepare themselves for their futures.

“While a lot of us might know what is happening with college in our future, a lot of students in the school don’t, and that’s definitely something that needs to be done, and students need to be helped,” Olson said.

The club members also hope to set up a tutoring program.

“Grady is lucky enough, at least for the time being, to have the CCC as a resource that we can use during the school day,” sophomore Chloe Prendergast said.

Prendergast is one of the club’s early members, and is spearheading the tutoring program. The club is considering asking teachers to volunteer for tutoring times, or having students tutor each other.

“Right now I’m working on creating a survey for Grady to figure out what subjects need the most tutoring in and who would be willing or how many people would be willing to do that,” Prendergast said.

The club hopes that the program will be up in running by the start of next school year. Tutoring would take place after school in the CCC.

“I think if we were able to get a few teachers to volunteer once a week for an hour, then it would help those students who feel uncomfortable tutoring or getting tutored by students,” Prendergast said.

Additionally, the club hopes to deal with textbook shortages facing some classes, help clean up the library, push administration to fix leaking ceilings, reduce racial divisions among the academies, and lessen the environmental consequences that our cafeteria may cause.

“The club has a lot of things that it wants to happen, but realistically we have a few things that we actually want to do,” Prendergast said. “There are things like ‘cure the racial divide’ that we have no ability of controlling; that’s much deeper rooted in socioeconomics and history and parents and teachers than it is other students really, although we hope that by helping with schooling and making Grady more of a community, that might be a, just a little bit of an aftereffect.”

At this point, all of the club’s goals and plans remain flexible, as it is just getting started.

“We mostly want to focus on aspects of classrooms that we can fix – things like textbooks,” Blum said.

Olson said that the textbook shortages that some classes like 10th grade literature and science are facing are not a financial matter.

“We have the money to provide the textbooks really since APS basically provides for the core classes while we have to provide for the electives,” Olson said.

The school received a shipment of 2,000 textbooks in December, but many of them have not yet been bar-coded and distributed to students.

“Another major goal of the club is to make the facility a lot cleaner and just more friendly to the students,” Blum said. “For one thing, the bathrooms are pretty nasty, so we’re gonna see what we can do to clean them up, or at least make sure there’s soap dispensers and toilet paper.”

The club is considering working with the janitorial staff to work out a new schedule for cleaning, and making sure each bathroom gets cleaned every day or two.

Physics teacher Jeff Cramer suggested that the club improve teacher performance by having students evaluate them at some point in the school year, and give them feedback.

“Trying to change the culture of two things [is important],” Cramer said. “One of them is the way students perceive their school and how well they take care of it, but also trying to find a way that we can effectively change the teachers’ culture.”

While the club’s founders agree that changing administrative policies is also important, they are first focusing on smaller and more easily attainable goals.

“[One of the club’s immediate goals is] fixing the clocks and making them work again, which is going to be a huge financial matter of buying new batteries and then working with custodians to get them all up,” Olson said. “It’s a lot bigger than you’d think.”

Olson’s main goal for the club is to make the school, specifically the cafeteria, more environmentally friendly. She hopes to set up an efficient recycling system, and educate students about how to recycle.

“Our recycling program kind of just stopped, like we have recycling bins but people just put food trash in them.” Olson said. “So if we could just get that to be more of a program that would recycle that would be great.”

The club will be offering community service hours to its members, and to other Grady students who volunteer.

“It’s not just like you’re doing community service hours for other people; it’s like, you’re helping yourself by doing  these hours because you’re helping everyone in your own school which is pretty cool,” Olson said. “It’s not an opportunity that a lot of people get very often, so I think that’s a fun part of the club.”

The club’s founders remain optimistic, hoping that the club can have a significant impact on the school.

“I’d say a big goal would just be to leave a legacy for the club so that even once we’re gone, students and teachers will still be working together to make the school better,” Schuster said.