The Student Government Association at West Potomac organized “Wellness Week” to promote the overall wellness of students while shedding light on the riskier behaviors seen around school. One of the new features of Wellness Week was respect.

Members of SGA put up a paper tree and asked students to write down what and who they respected during lunches.

“[The tree] is for how students treat other students and how students treat teachers and just the line of respect in general”, said senior and SGA member Hayley Reynolds. “The tree is supposed to represent what [students think] deserve respect.”

This tree served as a more interactive way of instructing students on proper behavior.

“We wanted to try something new this year–essentially to promote acceptance,” said senior and SGA member Ward Anderson. “I’ve noticed that a lot of people exclude others, they discriminate against others, and the leadership class thought that this tree would be a good idea for people to voice their opinion on things that they think deserve respect, or people that they think deserve respect.”

The students in SGA put together activities to promote wellness after carefully evaluating the needs of the school.

“We gauge what areas [the school] needs to focus on based off of the FCPS county wide surveys given to freshmen and juniors,” explained Anderson. “We try to address the [problems based off of the surveys] as student to student instead of just coming across as a teacher lecturing a student.”

In the past, SGA has organized many other activities and events to counter the common problems seen around West Potomac and society in general.

“[SGA] visited Sandburg last year to discourage tobacco use,” said Anderson. “We basically try to improve things for the student body so they know that their actions have consequences.”