Last autumn, when our community was first sitting down in the PAC to get back into the routine of our weekly Community Meeting, we listened to senior speeches, discussed the new schedule and welcomed new freshmen into our community. Community Meeting was largely unchanged from the year before.
However, there was one major difference that emerged as the school year went on. It is an SA tradition for each senior to be announced by four of their friends with funny anecdotes before giving their speech. Breaking from the traditional four, many of last year’s seniors decided that they were going to have more people introduce them.
This change may seem small, but its impact was large. The audience more excited to hear speeches because there was more anticipation. We laughed more because there was more jolliness to laugh at. A step in our ritual became an even more special moment of ceremony.
However, this year, it was made clear to the seniors that due to time constraints, senior speech introductions were to have a strict four-person limit. Like many of my peers, my initial reaction was one of extreme disappointment, but also anxiety. I was sad that a part of Community Meeting was being made less fun. Also, I was scared that it was going to cause people to pick between friends.
After we talked about it in our grade-level meeting, many of the seniors complained amongst themselves – I did not hear a single person say that they were happy the rules were stricter.
My fellow senior, Natalia Yataco (‘26), told me, “I get it’s about time. But I don’t know, I think everybody should be allowed to be represented by the people they want.” She also remembered that “everybody was just trying to find some loophole” after being told the news.
Others felt that holding everybody strictly to four people would cause exclusion in friend groups due to the necessity of choosing only four friends. Also, people were annoyed that a fun thing for the students was being taken away.
This reaction from myself and the rest of the seniors made me start thinking about Community Meeting. Over the course of my time here at Sonoma Academy, it’s undergone many changes – some intentional, some not. Structurally and tonally, it does not look the way it did when I first came here on my visit day.
The schedule we had before the mod system allowed for a much longer Community Meeting. Thus, we had many more long presentations and announcements from various sides of our school. Unfortunately, it was very unstructured, and we would often go way over the time limit that was set. We would even burn through advisory.
It was clear that there was a need to trim down Community Meeting. Many advisory conversations were centered around how it needed to be shorter.
Now we have the opposite problem: We don’t have enough time in Community Meeting to do all the things that make it worthwhile. Over the past couple of years, we’ve had so many different schedules, so the time allocated to lunch, advisory and Community Meeting has shifted around a lot.
It’s not just me who has been feeling like this. The sentiment was echoed by Maddie Castro (’26): “There’s a lot of vital programming things that they have to do, but when that’s the whole Community Meeting because Community Meeting is so short, it’s not fun and it’s boring and it makes people want to skip.” She thinks a longer Community Meeting would be better, so we had more time and didn’t have to rush.
Jessica Walton, Director of Student Experience and Belonging, talked about the difficulties of dealing with this with me. Walton said, “it’s tricky because you get accustomed to a particular type of Community Meeting, and then the time gets extended by 15 minutes or cut by 20 minutes. It’s hard to do the planning piece of that when it’s changing.”
Time is not the only factor that has changed Community Meeting over the years; up until the completion of the PAC, we had the majority of our meetings in the gym. Having it in there allowed for a much wider variety of Coyote Cup activities. We could do anything sports related because we had the whole basketball court of space, but we could still do non-sports related Coyote Cup challenges like spelling bee.
The gym provided a much more casual space than the PAC does. The PAC has professional theatre lighting, a stage and chairs fit for a serious production. The gym had none of that. It felt much more like a traditional coming together of a school community. We still had much of the same serious content, but at times it felt almost like a pep rally when we didn’t have something serious to talk about.
I talked to some of my fellow seniors who remember when Community Meeting was in the gym. Matthew Hobson (’26) told me, “I feel like back in the gym it was much less boring because there were more activities and more engagement. Nowadays it just feels like I’m at a meeting.”
However, there were some downsides. Since everyone is really close together in the gym, it encourages conversation while the speakers are talking. Community Meeting should be fun and engaging, but there’s also a lot of really important information that gets conveyed during the assembly, and people need to be paying attention.
Another issue with the gym is that it’s much more technically difficult. Walton explained that “What would happen for the gym Community Meetings is the tech team would be setting up all the AV and air equipment for a good hour before.”
These concerns are valid: Our tech team already does so much for us, and nobody wants to feel disrespected on stage. However, the same things that may be cons to some people are also pros to others. Perhaps the chit chatter from sitting on top of each other was precisely what made Community Meetings more fun in the gym compared to the PAC.
That’s why I believe there needs to be more discussions between the students and the administration about what Community Meeting should look like. It should be a space where everyone leaves feeling more connected to their community, not bored of it.