By Joud Baghal, Staff Photographer
In room 231 every Thursday at lunch the club Baron Bridge Builders (BBB), a group of about 25 students of all ages meet. They gather and talk about different upcoming events and goals they want to reach for the year overall.
Baron Bridge Builders was started by a former teacher at Fountain Valley High School, Janet Jue. She has been at the school since the beginning and noticed a lot of friction between students. It came to a point where teachers would use their lunch to keep an eye on them. Jue felt it necessary to start this club to better the relationships between the students and culture at school.
“There were a lot of fights on campus…and so she started Bridge Builders in order to try to keep the peace and do activities to try to… celebrate the students’ differences,” said Janet Marquez, the current advisor of the club.
The club is mainly a student driven club. These students focus on making events and finding new ways to make others feel comfortable; ensuring that all students know BBB is there for them if they ever need help.
“Our purpose is really to help keep students connected… we like to do activities that bring students together and if there are any social issues we try to bring in awareness to [these] social issues on campus,” said Marquez.
BBB recently went to California State University Fullerton to participate in Day of Dialogue. Students and teachers were able to attend presentations held by different clubs and programs. The main purpose of this event is to see which presentation was the most effective and is worth to bring back to school. Each group offers to come to people’s school and perform or repeat the same presentation.
At the beginning of the event a schedule was handed out providing the showtimes and presentation sessions that were going to occur. The event lasted for three hours allowing all people to have the chance to attend at least three presentations. They all ran pretty similarly, introduction, followed by the presentation, then a question and answer segment at the end.
The introductions and question and answer portions allowed students and staff members to understand more not only about the group with conducts the presentation, but about what they stand for as a group and what the intended effect of the presentation is on anyone who sees it.
For what started as a way for teachers to prevent fights during lunch, it has grown a lot over the years and will continue to grow.
