The school must do what it takes for all students to receive information. Announcements during the lunch hour drown out community voices.
This year, announcements begin at the start of lunch. The loudspeakers echo at 11:45 a.m. sharp for anyone who wants to listen — the problem is, they can’t.
With students filling the halls, chatting, walking, and slamming doors, announcements have been reduced to just one more layer of noise. To make matters worse, many students leave campus for lunch, with only 4.1% of surveyed students saying they eat lunch at school every day.
In the past, announcements at Roosevelt High School were made at the start of second period. Students would be inside their relatively quiet classrooms, allowing for school news and important information to be clearly heard at a designated time.
According to a poll by the Associated Students of Roosevelt, of the 319 students surveyed, only 1.3% said that they could hear this year’s announcements on a consistent basis.
When asked if students know what is happening around the school, over 50% of the polled group said that they did not know what was going on, with 42% saying that they only knew a little bit of what is going on in the school community.
ASR President Britta Rindal, senior, commented on the goal of announcements: “We’re really working on building more community and more togetherness [at] Roosevelt. … A big way to build community is to raise attention to different things that people are working on, whether that be sports, or the arts, or generally anything people are working on,” she said. “We really want to build awareness and with the awareness then comes support, and encouragement for students.”
Rindal also explained the benefits of announcements for each student, “Not only does it then feel good for a student to be like — I’m being recognized in the announcements — but it’s also interesting for other students [to think], ‘Oh, there’s a game this weekend, I’m gonna go to that,’ or, ‘Dramafest signups are coming up, I’m gonna try that out.’” She continued, “I think a big thing that we’re trying to do with announcements is we’re building that community.”
Announcements give a welcoming voice to the Roosevelt community that help include and inform students. Without these, an important part of the community is lost.
Senior class council member Bailey Poort critiqued the accessibility of the current announcement content: “If you want to participate in something or go to an event, not everyone has forms of social media that a lot of these [announcements] are posted on. So the best way [to share information] is to announce it while people are at school. That is something equitable for everybody, [and is] not something that can be taken away … the problem with [announcements] in the halls, [is that] you can’t hear them.”
Rindal added, “Social media is not accessible to everybody, but anyone who’s in class and in school is going to get the announcements. Having that at lunch though, is not equitable either. Because you’re going to get kids who can’t hear anything in the hallways, [and] there’s a hallway … with just no speakers at all. On top of that the hallways are loud and noisy. With about 2000 kids in school walking the halls each day, you can’t hear those announcements.”
Rindal continued, “I understand teachers are upset about [how announcements] take up classroom time, but announcements [are] two to three minutes max. And not even that. … If it means losing two minutes of instructional time every day, I think that I speak for most students [when I say] we’re okay with that because it all comes down to making these announcements accessible to everybody.”
Rindal was adamant that she shared common ground with Roosevelt’s teachers and administrators and that all parties could meet in the middle of sharing important information while maximizing class-time. Rindal is not pointing fingers, “it’s just, these are some simple asks that we would like to at least be like heard [out] about.”
School announcements are as important as ever after two years of pandemic and time away from campus. The school must do what it takes for all students to receive this important information. Announcements during the lunch hour drown out the community voices of Roosevelt. A change must be made.
