It’s dark, the stars are still out, students eyes are still half-shut as they trudge their way into school when bam! Light, high fives, free hugs, noise and smiles greet them at the door. Associated Student Body (ASB) students are once again at the entrances of the school, greeting students as they stumble into another day.

Leadership teacher Danielle O’Leary has her leadership students greet students as they enter the school in the morning. She wants students to see the ASB officers in action, the other is to start everyone’s day off well.

“Sometimes people go throughout the school day and don’t talk to anyone, so if they have a morning hello maybe that will make them happier and make them understand that someone cares about you,” O’Leary said.

O’Leary and the ASB team didn’t come up with this idea on their own; they were inspired by a leadership conference last spring in Sumner.

“A lot of other schools talked about the impact that they had having their ASB students greeting at the door and just the power of hello and a smile and how that can change someone’s day for the better and how simple something like that could be,” O’Leary said. “So we kinda made a goal at the beginning of the year to start doing that.”

This year the leadership class  has a lot of new goals. Aside from greeting students in the morning, ASB is also doing random acts of kindness throughout the school year.

“We cleaned the teacher’s lounge, last year they did a teacher car wash. And at the home football games we do what we call a Seahawk Sweep and we go after everyone’s gone and go in the bleachers and pick up the garbage on the home and away sides, so we help the janitors that way, so the janitors don’t have to do it later,” Sophomore senator Kyle Urbon said.

That’s not all the ASB team has up their sleeve though, they are also creating ‘Seahawk Grams’ that students will receive for various things. Students may receive Seahawk Grams for, as O’Leary said, ‘looking awesome’ or for performing well in a competition.

To achieve all of the great things that ASB is doing this year, from organizing school assemblies, making Seahawk Grams, to performing random acts of kindness, it takes a lot of hard work and great minds. O’Leary has confidence in this group of students and believes they can achieve everything they want too this year and make it one of the best years that ASB has had.

“I think it’s an all-star group, probably the best we’ve ever had. I think the reason for that is because we’ve had awesome years prior, where they’re seeing by example what true leadership is,” O’Leary said. “So we get more and more involvement from different types of kids and they have role models from previous ASB students to really show them like this is what a leader’s about.”

The leadership classroom this year is broken into five different teams, so the activities get spread around evenly. Taking after previous leaders, some students volunteer to do more than their share when it comes to welcoming students in the morning. Urbon is one of the students that goes above and beyond the call of duty in the morning, but he thinks the response from students makes it worthwhile.

“Some kids come up to us in the morning and they’re like, ‘Wow you guys are still here? We wouldn’t expect you to be here this long.’ It’s just good to know that they actually recognize us,” Urbon said.

The ASB students have been getting the positive response from all of their activities that they have been hoping for but have found greeting in the morning to be especially rewarding.

“One of my favorite moments was the other day, during ninth grade English, first period, when Houston Butchoe, who greets people every morning, walked in, he hadn’t greeted that morning, and this little kid goes, ‘Houston, I missed you this morning,'” O’Leary said.  “He remembered Houston, every day, and he was looking forward to seeing him and Houston didn’t show up, I was making him do something, so he looks forward to that smile and that hi every day.”