| Hype: It's SNL, but better |
By: SUZANNE ROOK, Managing Editor
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Posted: Tuesday, November 24, 2009 11:52 pm
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Northfield Middle Schoolers danced and sang to the music as they enjoyed HYPE, a new program that replaces the troubled SNL, shut down last year.
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When Mary Hahn heard that the school district had discontinued its popular middle school program, SNL, she picked up the phone and called the school principal.
Hahn’s daughter Erin, then a sixth-grader, enjoyed the occasional Saturday evening program. It was a place for the teen to get together with friends, listen to music, play some games and just hang out.
Neither had any idea of problems with the program — that the numbers of students versus chaperones was out of balance, that kids were regularly getting into scuffles and that everybody wasn’t having a good time.
At least once, police were called to the school to break up a fight. Another time, students tossing a ball at the ceiling hit a sprinkler head, spewing hundreds of gallons of water across the wood gym floor.
So when Northfield Middle School Principal Jeff Pesta asked Hahn if she and her husband, Steve, would join a committee dedicated to revamping the program, she agreed.
“The reason I joined,” she said, “was to help keep it going.”
With a reformulated program, and a new name, Saturday nights at the middle school are back.
Few, but significant
Northfield’s Saturday Night Live began about 10 years ago, said Pesta, a program of the district’s Community Services Division. So popular was SNL that 450 kids regularly showed up for an evening of dancing, games, swimming and middle school fun, a number well above what staff and a handful of college students could manage.
But through the years, the program was never re-evaluated, say Pesta and Jen Winterfeldt, Community Services youth development coordinator.
When Winterfeldt took over the program last year, SNL was well past needing a time out, said Pesta, who regularly took calls about the bad behavior of some attendees and said his custodial staff frequently dealt with messes left over from the overcrowded events.
Pesta said it wasn’t any one thing that forced him to ask for a temporary stoppage of SNL, but an accumulation of issues.
The first concern, Pesta had, was that SNL was seen by parents as a middle school program when it was run by Community Services and chaperoned by its staff, which included college students and some teachers paid for their time..
A second issue, says Pesta and Winterfeldt, was that students could just show up at the door, giving organizers no idea how many teens to expect. That meant they couldn’t ensure enough supervision or be certain who was in the school building.
And while the program, held at NMS, is open to middle schoolers living in the school district, Pesta says there was no way to know who was there and where they were from. That, he says, caused a whole other set of problems. And once SNL ended, kids were walking off into the dark or waiting well past the 9 p.m. end time for a ride home.
The stoppage of SNL was never intended to be permanent, said Pesta, pointing out that middle schoolers were polled about the program: what they enjoyed and what they didn’t. And, he helped Winterfeldt put together a group of parents, students, teachers and administrators to redesign SNL.
What they came up with is HYPE — Helping Youth Positively Engage — rolled out in October.
Winterfeldt said the changes are few, but significant.
The biggest change for students is the time, sign up and schedules. HYPE now runs from 6 to 8 p.m. and attendees need to either preregister with Community Services online or come into the school at the start of the event with a parent. More teacher chaperones have been recruited, giving each event at least 18 adults to a smaller number of students, and not until the final HYPE event in May can all middle schoolers attend.
Dividing the evenings by grade keeps the numbers smaller and allows kids some breathing room.
Seventh-graders Britanny Seheurer and Griffin Reppe, who attended Saturday’s HYPE, said they’re glad to have the program back. And though only 100 or so showed up, they saw no difference in programming between HYPE and SNL.
On Saturday, Reppe said, there weren’t the fights of last year, something he said was a problem.
His only complaint is that you’ve got to sign up in advance or have your parent bring you in to register.
“I guess they want to know where you are,” he said, adding that he planned to come to school Monday and tell friends they need to put HYPE on their February calendars.
Reppe said there were rumors that rule tightening would make HYPE dull. Not true, said Reppe.
“I’m going to tell them it was a lot of fun,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Maybe next time.”
IF YOU GO
Students interested in attending HYPE (Helping Youth Positively Engage), need to register online at nfld.k12.mn.us/commservdiv/youthdevelopment.shtml. Cost is $8 per middle schooler. Events run from 6 to 8 p.m.
Future HYPE dates:
Feb. 6 — sixth- and seventh-graders
March 6 — eighth-graders
May 1 — sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders
Registration begins Dec. 18.
— Suzanne Rook is the managing editor and covers education. She can be reached at srook@northfieldnews.com or 645-1113. |
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