Sticky Situations

1.     Danica, a Club President in your division, sends you an email and asks to join a meeting with her Executive Board. You have a good relationship with Danica—she has attended all of your Presidents’ Council Meetings and got many members of her club involved in your Division Wide Function. Danica welcomes you to the Zoom room only to tell you that this is no normal meeting after all: the Executive Board needs your help ousting their faculty advisor, Mr. Green. Danica tells you that Mr. Green is dedicated to the club but shows up late to meetings, if at all. Mr. Green also wants the Board members to reach out to more students in the school; but the club officers feel that Key Club membership should be an invitation-only kind of thing. You are caught off-guard, but say “Look, it’s your club, we are a student-led organization, and you get to make the call.” You promise to email Governor Raghav and ask for help finding a new faculty advisor for the club. When Raghav asks if there is an issue with their current advisor, you tell him that Mr. Green never comes to any club meetings. Raghav says “Well, if Mr. Green has basically resigned already, we will reach out to the Kiwanis Governor, Chris White, to get this fixed!”

2.     You get an email from a new address—Ms. Black—who tells you she is a member of a Kiwanis Club near your division. She tells you that her club is energized and ready to support new Key Clubs, and has even identified a new school in the area without one. She asks you to reach out the school principal to see if there is any interest in starting a Key Club at the school and to potentially set up a meeting between the Kiwanis members and the principal. The school principal responds to your enthusiastic email with a cautious “yes,” saying that she would poll teachers and students to gauge any interest in launching a new club dedicated to service and leadership. Luckily, you know a couple of students at the target school (though they don’t actually know each other), and reach out to them directly to see if they could get behind the idea of Key Club. After your stellar pitch, the students say they are all in on the idea. Realizing that you need to draft your newsletter by midnight, you decide that the best thing to do is connect each of your friends with Ms. Black; together, they can drum up the support necessary to convince the principal to move forward with the club.

3.     Your younger brother, Tremeco, entered high school this year. You are about to graduate after an excellent term as Lieutenant Governor for the Carolinas District of Key Club International. Your home Key Club has struggled some this year—meeting remotely has caused the club president, Natalie, to have some trouble drumming up interest in service. Nevertheless, Natalie tried hard. Drawing on her experience as a freshman representative and club Vice President, Natalie expanded outreach to new students (including Tremeco!), placed new emphasis on virtual service projects, and donated the money the club saved on weekly donuts during meetings to a local homeless shelter. Natalie wants to take her service to the next level and serve on the District Board as a Lieutenant Governor during her senior year—and she would be great at it. There’s only one problem: Tremeco wants to become an LTG, too (two members of your club are already slated to serve as Secretary and Editor on the Executive Board, so only one slot is left on the District Board for your school). Tremeco has seen you work with adults across your community this year and understands that the District Board could be a launching pad to bigger and better things—an Executive Officer position, and maybe International President! It would really help Tremeco get into a great college in a few years to have something like that on his resume. You don’t want to do anything underhanded, but make sure to mention to Natalie how challenging your year as Lieutenant Governor has been: constant emailing, newsletters on top of newsletters, and committee work to boot. You give Tremeco different advice—helping him with the interview questions you faced and counseling him about the path to the top of the organization.

4.     Your division wide function is scheduled for Sunday and—you can’t believe it—everything points toward a massive success. In spite of a global pandemic and universal exhaustion with Zoom, you have over 115 RSVPs from students around your division willing to attend your virtual trivia night. You’ve planned everything to a tee: a four-hour extravaganza featuring get-to-know-you activities, sweet background music for all the breakout rooms, teams organized by themes, and a set of trivia spanning across interest areas. It was hard to convince any adults to attend your virtual event on a Sunday night, but thankfully a faculty advisor (and no-nonsense swim coach) at a school in your division, Ms. Redd, offered to supervise the meeting on your behalf. 15 minutes before the meeting begins, Ms. Redd sends you a message: “Emergency swim practice for my school tonight from 6pm until midnight. The team must be punished for a late assignment turned in by the captain on Friday to her English teacher. Sorry!” And poof—the only adult RSVP’d for your meeting won’t be attending after all. 50 students are already in the waiting room, so you decide to go for it. The meeting is almost full (except for Ms. Redd’s swim team) and you, though sweating a lot, pull off the four-hour event. Monday morning, you start receiving a few disturbing reports from concerned students: in one breakout room, during round 3, an attendee called another “dumb as a rock” and “absolutely incompetent.” When the room failed to stand up for him, the targeted student left the meeting in tears. In another breakout room, you learn, a couple of friends from Western Rock High School were drinking beer while in the meeting. Administrators at the schools involved want to know who they should talk to about these violations of their honor codes, and you hesitate to respond the only way you know how: “me?”