The New Advisory
One of the best parts of Saint Ursula is the numerous opportunities that the school provides for all of the classes to mix and get to know one another. From all-school lunch to extracurriculars to BARC, SUA encourages its older and younger students to support each other.
Perhaps the best example of this is advisory, where students from all four grades come together to discuss and do service, trade various tips and advice, receive school information, and more. For the upperclassmen, advisory has been a constant for their high school careers but this year new changes have completely remodified advisory.
Some of these new changes include limiting advisories to once every other week, cutting back on mission collection, and switching the times of service events like DRIVE. As with any change, there are both supporters and opponents.
Abby Spencer ‘21 favors the new advisory set up because it “gives [her] a lot more freedom during the day to do homework, meet with teachers, etc.”
Sarah Watts ‘20, on the other hand, does not like the new changes, saying that she “would rather [advisory] go back to how it was last year because then you can see everyone more often and grow stronger connections.”
Sophia Dugan ‘21 is a PAL and she says that “the new advisory schedule is really helpful from a leadership perspective because you have more time to plan things and make it more meaningful and purposeful.” Dugan also admits that the free time is “really nice” and she is “thankful that [she] doesn’t have to stress about making advisory run smoothly every week.”
According to PAL and advisory moderator Ms. Jennings, the purpose of the advisory changes is to incorporate more free time into SUA students’ schedules. One of the most common requests that administration has received over the past few years was for more recreational or study times, and so it was decided that this reducing the frequency of advisories would be a good way to achieve that. Ms. Jennings also adds that “by limiting advisory meetings it makes the activities we do there more intentional.”
When asked whether the new changes seem to be a good fit for SUA, Ms. Jennings says that she has “gotten a lot of really good feedback and it seems to have mostly positively benefited the school.”
Despite the new format of advisory, much of its purpose remains the same and SUA students are lucky to be able to partake in it.
What do you think? Answer our poll here.