Here at South we have many student-led groups that are here to help and improve our community. Two of the most prominent include the National Honor Society and the Student Council. They are both responsible for a litany of school events and programs but communication between the two groups sometimes fails them and tension builds between the two groups. Both of them work to support the community, but sometimes miscommunication causes some problems for the groups.
Junior Marco Dregni described Student Council as an organization that is primarily focused on setting up school dances, community events and creating a positive environment. They’re in charge of many popular dances at South including the homecoming dance and the winter ball. The community fundraisers that they are in charge of include the blood drive, food drive, clothing drive and the winter olympics.
Owen Casey, president of NHS, explained that National Honors Society is a group of students that focuses on scholarships and community organization. They work to support and connect students that have proven themselves to be dedicated to their academics. They give back to the community through things like tutoring other students (primarily through services like the writing or math center), doing the recycling and putting on events like the annual talent show as well as the Sadies Hawkins dance.
These two groups had a brief conflict this February when the Winter Ball and the annual talent show were accidentally scheduled on the same day.

Marco Dregni, vice president of Student Council said that, “I think that student council and NHS don’t communicate at all which can lead to mostly scheduling problems.” Dregni said that, “other than that there isn’t any overt tension between the two organizations in my mind.”
Kaitlyn Mulhern, senior and vice president of the National Honors Society, said that “there’s a limit to the amount of money and… students are going to pay for an event so that can be an issue.” Mulhern said that, “students aren’t going to go to that many dances or that many events.”

“I think it gets a little tense just because there used to be rivalries,” explained Owen Casey, current president of National Honors Society. “I have no bad blood with them,” he added. The talent show was eventually rescheduled to an earlier date so that the two events didn’t conflict with each other. This didn’t change the effect of having both events tickets being sold at the same time had on the total attendees.
Aside from this isolated incident these two groups do a lot of positive work for and with the South community. Stephanie Woldum, one of the advisors of NHS expressed that, “it’s important to provide students with another group or like an outlet to connect.” Woldum also mentioned how, “If we didn’t do the recycling, we wouldn’t recycle at all.”
Woldum explained how the two groups are on an active path to help their communication. “We have a lot of members who are apart of both, so for the past couple years I think at least one or two students have been both in Student Council and part of our executive board and that helps a lot.” She also said that this year when doing interviews for the next years officers, they considered putting people who are a part of both in charge of communication so that they could have a “duel knowledge of both”.