Pulse and the counseling department will hold the school’s third Redhawk Rant over bullying on Wednesday, but this year, things are a bit different as students are now leading the discussion in the effort to create more of a dialogue.

“This year we decided to changed Redhawk Rants from being teacher lead to student lead and it has been kind of a grand experience,” counselor Staci Stokes said. “At the student ambassador training we were learning about how to have really difficult conversations about sensitive topics in high school it really came apparent that high school students want to have these conversations with other high school students. So that is when we decided to come up with the idea to have student leaders in charge of the Redhawk Rants.”

Pulse and Student Council, along with other volunteers, are the classroom leaders and they are seeing the benefit of leading the Rants first hand.

“Having the Redhawk Rants being student led is a really good idea. It makes the students much more comfortable to talk to students than to teachers because us student know where the other students are coming from,” freshman Sasha Cornelius said. “It also helps if you know the students in the classroom really well because it’s not as nerve-racking because you are talking to people you know rather than people you don’t know.”

Leading the classroom discussions, the students have help along the way.

“The student leaders are briefed on the presentation, teachers of course are still in the classroom and we highly encourage them to support the students and step in the presentations if need be,” Stokes said. “But they are student lead and so far things have been going pretty well, we’ve been getting good feedback of course tweaking things along the way.”

Senior Maniza Farhad seems to agree, thinking the student led Redhawk Rant is more conducive to promoting productive dialogue.

“Having students lead discussions creates a safer environment to vent,” senior Maniza Farhad said. “It also gives students initiative to lead discussions that we don’t regularly have in class.”