The new school year has brought many changes to Lambert, but despite challenges arising from new school policies, clubs continue to thrive at Lambert. Lambert is home to an incredibly active club culture, boasting over 80 clubs in the school and a growing number of new clubs taking their first steps towards creating a dynamic presence at Lambert.
Creating clubs is a popular way to find people with shared interests and share skills and passions with fellow students. One of Lambert’s newer clubs, recSTEM, seeks to do the same. RecSTEM focuses on providing STEM opportunities to students and education pertaining to the field, and offers many activities like volunteering and school competitions. Nish Chawla, one of recSTEM’s founding officers, touches on some of the club’s overarching goals.
“Through recSTEM we really hope to give students at Lambert High school and other surrounding schools, even middle schools, a chance to explore STEM in a way that is easy to understand and accessible,” Chawla explained.
In order to achieve this goal, an important factor for recSTEM will be expanding their audience in order to build a bigger community and have a greater impact in STEM education.
Member outreach is important for all clubs and Lambert, even more so for newer clubs who are still trying to build an audience at Lambert. Club Rush has remained an essential event towards building membership growth for all kinds of clubs at Lambert. This past August, several clubs set up booths in the gym, preparing to meet all the freshmen and sophomores attending Club Rush. Underclassmen use the opportunity to find what clubs interest them, and the event is a huge help to clubs like recSTEM in recruiting new students to join their club.
“We were able to bring in about 60 or 70 members, so we brought in a lot of people, and that was great for our club,” Chawla noted.
Besides Club Rush, new clubs have also gained recognition through advertisements on the hallway TV and social media. However, the recent Distraction Free Education Policy has prevented students from scanning QR codes and accessing social media due to the ban on personal electronic devices.
“A big thing is that those flyers, and the QR codes on the TVs, a lot of times you can’t scan them because you don’t have your phone to scan it with during the day, and that does lead to people not being able to join the club,” Chawla described.
This new change led clubs like recSTEM to take a slightly different approach towards advertising, accommodating this new phone-free policy. Clubs have shifted to paper forms for sign ups and attendance records. Many clubs have also begun to shift from using Group Me to Canvas, an app that is accessible on school issued computers, unlike the latter.
Paws for Harmony is a new club at Lambert that focuses on creating a nurturing community for students through their shared love for music and the Lambert Pack’s therapy dogs. At their first meeting on September 3rd, Paws for Harmony co-president Jiaxian Cao notes on the fun competition they held to attract their target audience.
“For recruiting we’re trying to appeal to younger people, so for our first meeting to attract a lot of the student demographic we held a Labubu raffle and Labubu doll giveaway,” Cao explained.
Clubs have had to become very creative with their club management, as creating and advertising a new club is already a tremendous task for its officers. On top of that, Lambert’s new school policies have thrown many hurdles in the club’s journey, adding extra difficulties compared to previous years.
However, the experiences of recSTEM’s and Paw’s For Harmony demonstrate that new clubs can and are still prospering at Lambert. They are creating a great impact by adapting to these various challenges, showing how Lambert can still maintain its vibrant culture despite these new policy changes.
