After presenting at Club Rush and holding one meeting, the RHS diversity club was forced to cease activity. According to club vice president Jayden So, the club was given two reasons for the shutdown.
“The two reasons they gave us for why they’re shutting the club down is because one, they think it’s because we’re seniors and we’re just doing it for our resumes or to look good for our applications. But that just isn’t true because, for our meeting, we spent 60 dollars on supplies and snacks and stuff for our members. Obviously, we’re not just doing this just to mess around or anything like that,” So said, “The second reason was because our club objective is way too similar to other club objectives. But that doesn’t make sense because two years ago the club was a thing, Hailee Black was the president, and that was still when ASL and the Latino Student Union, all those clubs were still there. So I don’t get how our objective is similar when it was still a club when all the other ‘similar’ clubs were a thing two years ago.”
President Jaden Broussard believes that the club’s closure is a detriment to the school. He is upset that those wanting a safe space cannot acquire one now that the club no longer exists.
“I was just really sad to hear that our club got shut down and hearing that information and seeing that we’re not going to be able to be a club and support diversity around our school and be able to have freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and even our seniors come in our club and have a great time,” Broussard said.
According to So, the sudden shutdown was a surprise to all participants in the club. They were expecting to have more meetings and received vocal support from the principal and club director.
“We were just really blindsided about it because at Club Rush we were talking about diversity club to Ms. Serin and Mr. Mattix and they both said it was a great idea so it was just really confusing and shocking to us when we got the email to shut down,” So said, “It’s also shocking because for our first meeting, we had 30 people show up and the biggest thing was that people were participating and putting in effort and making posters which was what our first meeting was. We put up 20 posters around the school.”
Former members believe that the club’s resignation is a loss for the members and the school as a whole. According to them, the club was a fun way to hang out and celebrate diversity.
“I like it a lot,” senior Joey Dupont said. “It’s community, there’s a lot of people actually. It’s very bond building, safe place, cool people.”
“I’m actually really sad about the club being shut down because I think the club had a really good mission and a really good goal to kind of unite everybody and include everybody. Our meetings were really fun,” Senior Cali St. Clair said.
Following the airing of this story, the Diversity Club was reinstated on campus. According to Vice President Jayden So, they are excited to be back in business.
“After our segment on Eye of the Tiger, out story gained a lot of attention. It really came out that everything was just a big misunderstanding. Nobody actually shut down our club but miscommunication led to us and our advisor to believe that our club was getting shut down,” So said. “I had a meeting with Ms. Serin and she basically told us that Diversity Club is back up and that she’s going to approve it. She said that there’s a bunch of flaws in the process of clubs and getting them approved. She said she’s going to step in and be more involved in the process and I really appreciate that. She seemed to care a lot about what was going on and I like to see that from our principal. Diversity club is back up, it’s in room 600, Ms. Dodds classroom. We’ll do something big for our first meeting back to celebrate the revival of Diversity Club.”
