As a group, we took on a social campaign aimed to increase the support culture at Shirley Boys’ High School. As a school rich in history and culture we pride ourselves in the support our students have towards one another. As of recent years since moving from 77 North Parade, the school has experienced a drop in supporting culture. To us boys who have a stronger love for this culture this was a big negative to our schooling years here and we vowed to do something to lift back up the school during our final year as year 13s. Throughout the year our agenda was pushed and support was well back on the rise, but not quite to where we wanted it. From this we decided that campaigning for money would be the best way to further continue our progress. To do this we targeted influencing student council policy in hopes of receiving funds from them for our group. The policy which the student council ultimately ended up agreeing with us on, is for a $600 first up payment with a recurring payment of $300 in years following.
The reason we are wanting to achieve this is because we want everyone at the school to feel a sense of belonging and have experiences they’d remember for life, whether it be the players or supporters. By having this funding it will enable the Shirley army to buy things such as a mascot, banners and flags which will further increase the amount of students attending the schools sporting and cultural events. Having this school culture will add to the school experience in the way that it can get everyone involved and feel connected to the school.
The actions we took in the process of increasing the school’s culture was interviewing Shirley old boys and current teachers of the school Mr. Dunn and Mr. Pesefea. The purpose in carrying out these specific actions was to gather the staff’s support and thoughts towards what we were doing and how we could improve the culture to what it was like back in their years at Shirley.
The second action we carried out was creating a petition around seeing who would support getting this funding for the Shirley army. The reason for creating this petition was so it could be used as an argument when presenting to the student council. We ended up gathering 182 digital signatures and 22 physical signatures for the petition.
The last and final action we carried out was presenting the two previous actions to the student council in a slide presentation. The purpose of presenting to the student council was to achieve our final goal of getting the funding to go towards the Shirley army each year to help in increasing the school culture.
