Kenwood SGA Building Leadership Skills Throughout the Pandemic

Kenwood’s Student Government Association is one of, if not, the best in Baltimore County. Though they haven’t been able to be active in their usual way this past year, they were still an active engaged group, keeping the spirit and community going during these challenging times.

Last school year Kenwood’s SGA advisor Ms. Forman was named the Student Council Advisor of the Year for Baltimore County. Ms. Forman has been the advisor of SGA for the past five school years. Student leadership has continued to grow and thrive under her leadership. “Our SGA at Kenwood is working to grow student leaders and practice leadership skills with other SGA members across the county. I am very proud of the leaders that we have and hope to meet many more next school year,” she shares.

Our SGA has many wonderful faces and voices and the purpose of SGA is to make school activities fun for students. Maggie Woodring joined SGA because she wanted to be more active in school and help make it fun. She’s helped with things like the school’s Christmas tree, giving thank you cards to teachers, and much more in the years’ past. But due to the pandemic they’ve had to rethink how to do certain things. “We’ve learned to work around it like having a pandemic safe school clean up drive where we kept our masks on and remained outside for the most part,” Maggie explained.

They also organized many virtual spirit weeks from last Spring throughout this school year and once we did get to return to school in March they were the ones to decorate the building, welcoming students back.

Amyah Davis is the SGA social media coordinator. She posts and updates students before and during the pandemic about school events and activities like the Spirit weeks but also for things like Black History and Women’s History Month and Bully Prevention Week. She joined SGA because she loves planning and participating in activities and events. For her the pandemic made it hard for people to participate in events and activities. “It’s hard to get people to participate in a virtual environment so it’s a little tricky, but the teachers always get involved in tagging SGA during the spirit weeks,” Amyah says.

As a part of SGA Amaya hopes to accomplish her goal of being involved in school. “Colleges like to see what extracurricular activities you were a part of and being an active leader in SGA was my biggest goal,” she shares.

Several members including President Mekhi Miller and Social Media Manager Amyah Davis attended virtual leadership conferences this school year to build their leadership skills and network with other student leaders. The LEAD conference was about advocacy and student leadership. SGA member Zenaida Rowe attended the MASC legislative convention to vote on the state member of the board. The BCSC General assemblies which students attend are a way for SGA members from around the county to meet up and discuss their schools and get ideas for suture events. “From these conferences, I have learned different things about teamwork and leadership skills and came upon new ideas as well to make our SGA even stronger with the help of BCPS,” shares Amyah.

The pandemic may have kept SGA members out of school, but it didn’t stop them from being the strong school leaders that they are. SGA is excited to return to the building next school year though and bring new ideas and events to life in the halls of Kenwood.