Muhlenberg Area High School held a Building Unity in Our Community conference inviting clubs in local school districts, and the BIONIC club at Hamburg was a part of this conference. Eight students were invited to attend this conference on April 8, and it lasted all day. There were youth-led panel discussions from the Aevidum club and Youth Mental Health Ambassadors at Muhlenberg. Schools including Conrad Weiser and Boyertown were also part of this conference and helped out with some of the stations. The discussions at the youth-led panel talked about coping mechanisms and different ways trauma can affect students.
Muhlenberg’s Aevidum club is similar to Hamburg’s BIONIC club; or Believe It Or Not I Care club. BIONIC is run by Mrs. Wiles-Herbert and Mrs. Ponter, and they take care of new and returning students, as well as any major issues going on with students who need the extra assistance. Muhlenberg’s Aevidum club, however, helps support and discourage the silence around depression and suicide among teens, along with other issues. Aevidum, the name for the club, stands for “I’ve got your back” and encourages students to help each other through rough times.
Mrs. Ponter, one of the Advisors of the BIONIC club at Hamburg, found this trip inspiring to the students of Hamburg, and was happy to see their motivation. She said “I was so happy to see how motivated they were to learn, and how motivated they were to speak to those at the other schools”. She hopes Hamburg does something similar in the future, something organized like the youth-led panel discussion, since the whole field trip was planned and run by the students in Aevidum and the Youth Mental Health Ambassadors.
Alicia Gilbert, a junior at Hamburg who is in the BIONIC club, says that she enjoyed talking to students from other schools and seeing what they do at their school. She said “after learning about other schools, the students from Hamburg should be more involved in clubs and the making of clubs.” She enjoyed the station where they had a tall mirror that had sticky notes of encouraging words on it.
