Mara Bastin | Staff Writer
Keeping our public politically informed, more commonly known as KOPPI, had their first meeting this morning during STaR. With a new sponsor and a new team of executives, the change in leadership is expected to take the club in a different direction than the previous years two years.
“For a while, our club was sort of in limbo because Mr. Blackburn was leaving,” treasurer Graham Kanwit said. “Not only did we have to find a new teacher to sponsor us, we had to get used to an entirely new team of executives who had never been in charge
The KOPPI executives plan to use this shift in leadership to their advantage as they progress throughout the year.
“In previous years, KOPPI experienced some major stagnation–members became disinterested in coming to the meetings and KOPPI somewhat ceased to grow,” president Vinay Bhamidipati said. “As opposed to last year, KOPPI will hold more of its exciting discussions on current world and national politics and less of the sometimes exhausting speakers. However, club favorites such as Trey Hollingsworth and Liz Watson will no doubt make a return.”
Along with new changes to the focus of the club, the executive team has been working on implementing two new groups called the ‘Young Democrats’ and ‘Young Republicans’ that will focus on volunteering around the community within each member’s respective political party.
“There is a lot of things you can do outside of school that not a lot of people know about like interning at candidate offices, going to town hall assemblies, and other stuff that is pretty politically involved,” Young Democrats president Jackson Gardner said. “Our main focus with the new volunteering groups was to expose our members to these different activities and hopefully make changes within the Greenwood community.”
Although they have made a lot of new changes this year, KOPPI believes they will steer the club in the right direction, improve the club and make it more inviting to outsiders than they did in previous years.
The club meets every Friday in the Chrome lab during STaR. They are accepting new members throughout the year.
