How Effective is the Advisory Memo?

Jayla Wright

Staff Writer

On every Monday and Thursday, students and parents receive an email containing information about current events affecting the SLA community. News in the memos range from updates on upcoming club meetings to telling students about volunteering

opportunities to raising interest for activities happening outside of school.

But is the message getting through?

To make sure students are aware of what’s happening in their school advisors were given the task of having the memos being read aloud during advisory. However, a week-long observation by SLAMedia revealed that not all advisors read the memos consistently — and some don’t read them at all.

During one week in November, Surveyed juniors revealed that one half of the junior advisories have the advisory memo read twice in that  week. A third of the advisories only had it read it once a week. And one advisory did not read it on Monday or Thursday.

Excellence Coordinator Jeremy Spry, who compiles  the memos, believes that the memos can be a good resource for the SLA Community even if it does not get read during advisory.

“I think either they really great way for parents to keep up to date on what’s happening inside the building. I know kids may not always read it or advisory is a very busy time so it may not always get read aloud. I know parents really enjoy the opportunity to figure out what’s happening in the school.”

At the same time Spry believes that the SLA community appreciates the memos.

“There must be some value in it. It goes out to a wide variety of people.”

Junior Kimberly Gucciardi-kriegh, on the other hand, finds that the memos are often ignored.

“A lot of people either don’t read it or don’t pay attention to it from what I’ve seen, but I always try to read it because either there’s something I already know is in there that I wanna see or I’m just like hey what’s going on I wanna join something new.”

Junior Miguel Rivera had positive outlook on the future of advisory memos.

“I think the video stuff is popping off. I also think that the advisory memos are gonna be more visual or shorter cause a lot of advisory memos now are very wordy or very long. People would pay a lot more attention if it was shorter or more condensed and to the main point.”

Rivera was referring to the new video memo items, organized by several Digital Video students. These videos are now shared with the SLA Community on Thursdays. The video from December 6th included announcements for spirit week, Improv Club, Black Student Union, and the winter concert:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNcwhNCM46o&feature=youtu.be

A casual poll of students in the SLAMedia class revealed that most advisories do watch the videos — but one student had no idea that these videos even existed.

Gucciardi-Kriegh and Rivera both admitted that when the memo does get through, good things can come of it.

“I was able to do a program that I otherwise wouldn’t know about because of the memos.” said Rivera.

Gucciardi-kriegh stated, “I think it just brings awareness to things going on in our school community also outside of our school. It just gives people more opportunities to broaden their horizons and join things they probably wouldn’t have known about if it wasn’t for the memos.”

Overall, the advisory memos seems to be appreciated by students despite it not always receiving attention. The dilemma of the memos the not being read seems to be less of an issue with its content more of an issue with the way it’s presented.

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