You may have noticed people in white and orange shirts at parent night and parent-teacher conferences, helping families find their classes and learn about some of the things that make South the school it is.  Those people were the newly named student ambassadors, formerly link crew.

Student ambassadors focus on welcoming new students and new families to the building to help them get to know the school. During the fall, student ambassadors have tours every Wednesday for families that might want to send their students to South. A presentation is shown in the media center and then the students are taken on tours throughout the building. 

Student ambassadors also show up at events such as parent night to help parents find their students’ classes.

There are many things student ambassadors does to help the school.  “We really focus on giving tours for new students. For example, the orientation. We helped new students get their schedules and show them around the school. And for parent night we helped them go around the school, helping them get where they need to go,”  said Junior Beza Abate.

There were multiple reasons that link crew changed into student ambassadors.  “One reason is link crew is an official group. In order to use the name ‘link crew,’ you have to do some specific things and we weren’t doing all of those things so we didn’t feel right calling it link crew… there’s a certain curriculum that you go through with the students, and we weren’t doing that curriculum,”  said Fred Chang, the advisor of student ambassadors.

Chang continued, ““The other is that I think we made it our own thing, we also asked the kids if they wanted to stay being link crew or if they wanted to be ambassadors, they chose to go with ambassadors… In some ways that describes what we want to do better, we want to be the people that welcome others into the high school.”

Multiple members of student ambassadors were asked if they felt a change from link crew. Raul Ortiz, senior and one of the leads in student ambassadors had a thought. “Not really, other than the people who run it. The people who run [student ambassadors] run it a little bit more differently but other than that, it’s pretty much the same.” 

There were multiple reasons that students joined, “I joined because I wanted something different and I wanted to explore what’s going on at South High because I didn’t really join a lot of clubs when I was a freshman and sophomore. So during my junior year to join a lot of clubs and student ambassadors was something interesting, so I decided to join it,” said Abate. 

When asked about what her favorite thing about student ambassadors was, Abate replied with “Getting to meet new students that are freshmen, showing parents around the school and telling them how great South High is.”