The year is 2025. Social media and technology are more prominent than ever — and so, too, are the risks that come with them. Sacramento Country Day’s new phone policy can only partially address these new developments. So what is the school’s other solution? Assemblies.

This year, Country Day has been focused on promoting digital wellness and community among students through various mandatory assemblies. However, in order for these assemblies to make a lasting impression on the student body, there needs to be a significant improvement in their quality. There have been three assemblies since the start of school. The first, presented by speaker Dino Ambrosi from Project Reboot on Oct. 15, was ideal, according to a poll done by Country Day students on the assemblies sent out Dec. 9. Out of roughly 180 attendees, 37 of the 40 students who responded to the poll said that the first assembly was their favorite, as it was well-organized and informative.

According to 20 students who attended, this was not the case for the second assembly on Nov. 15. These students said it was their least favorite out of the three, citing reasons such as irrelevant topics and disconnected ideas.

Sophomore Gabby Dos Santos Gonzalez feels similarly about the assemblies as a whole. “My opinion, in general, is that the assemblies were not very interesting and perhaps not presented in the best manner to reach their intended audience,” she said.

This failure to present information engagingly was apparent again in the third assembly on Dec. 4. Presented by author Liza Wiemer, the assembly focused on standing up to injustices. However, the organization and pacing of the presentation made the overall message hard to receive, according to junior Isaac Reynen.

“I understand that she wanted to get out this message of standing up; however, the content of what she was saying didn’t always pertain to the message. There was a lot of wandering,” Reynen said.

Additionally, Reynen thought Wiemer failed to make the presentation cohesive, which caused him to lose focus. He cited a specific example in which Wiemer switched from speaking about the Holocaust to speaking about how she got stuck in her car in New York, and the lack of connection between the two topics made it hard for Reynen to concentrate on the speaker’s message.

Head of School Lee Thomsen has also noticed this lack of cohesion. “There was a point where the two halves of the talk didn’t connect very clearly, which was unfortunate because I thought each piece was interesting on its own,” he said. Clearly, the main problem with most of the assemblies is not the content or the message; a lot of students can see the value in improving their relationships with technology and speaking out against injustices. The problem, instead, is how the messages are being conveyed.

If the school wants students to actually take away valuable lessons from assemblies, poor speakers and even more poorly organized PowerPoint slides are not the way to go. The quality of assemblies in the future needs to improve, and the most effective way to do that is to simply hire better speakers, ones with clearly structured presentations. For this to happen, the school needs to show more judgment when inviting guests in to speak. If more vetting is required, the likelihood of bringing in an outsider with a subpar presentation decreases.

More vetting could take different forms. One way is to make sure that the speaker’s presentation is heard beforehand to ensure that it is relevant and on-topic. This is crucial if the presenter comes from an outside organization and is not known to the school. Thomsen has recognized this, saying that it’s hard to know if a speaker will be good if he hasn’t heard them before. “Anytime you invite anyone in to speak, it’s always a little bit of a risk,” he said.

Another way to reduce this risk could be to require the student council to approve a presentation beforehand, which could help to bring the students’ opinions into consideration. Taking it even further, Wells thinks that student presenters could be the way to go. “I’m starting to think that maybe students themselves or teachers ourselves might be able to be stronger presenters than people we’re not sure about, because it’s very hard if you don’t actually see the assembly ahead of time,” he said.

Having students present for assemblies has the potential advantage of eliminating the need for outside speakers, though if more thought is put into inviting guests, this option will not be necessary.

A potential downside, however, of continuing to have adult speakers is that they might have trouble getting through to students, though Dos Santos Gonzalez argues that that is no excuse for assemblies to be unengaging and low-quality. “I know it’s hard talking to teenagers, and getting them to like something is complicated, but that’s just the challenge of working with them, and that is the speakers’ job,” she said.

If the speakers fail to do their job and assemblies do not improve in the future, it should not be mandatory for students to attend them if they do not enrich their education. Never again should Country Day high school students have to sit and listen to a 45-minute presentation that feels pointless.

Artwork credit: “Exemplary Assembly” by Claire Gemmell