By William McGinn
KAWARTHA LAKES-Students preparing for exams at Fenelon Falls Secondary School (FFSS)found a surprise message on their lockers on Monday morning. Notes of encouragement and inspiration.
The formal exam period for the students at FFSS begins this Thursday, and the students were welcomed into their second last week of school with notes and banners everywhere to help get them through their exams and final culminating projects.
They said things like: “Sometimes when things are falling apart, they may actually be falling into place”, “You may be disappointed if you fail, but you are doomed if you don’t try”, and “Don’t allow someone to make you feel like you’re not good enough.”
The students told Kawartha 411 that some of these quotes were researched, others made up by the students behind decorating the school with the messages, ninth graders Ruby Neumann and Alyson Turpin.
The pair, along with some other students, got together on Sunday afternoon and printed the quotes off on multicoloured paper, cut them out, and taped them on the school walls and lockers on Sunday night. It took them two hours to do so, and about two months to prepare. “We’ve been collecting quotes since the end of April, [then] we started typing them May, and then we printed them out Sunday afternoon and put them up Sunday night,” said Turpin.
Kelly Neumann, a teacher at FFSS helped out and facilitated access to the school after hours. Some students had fun with the messages and wallpapered some of them onto main single lockers. But they were all around the school and they are expected to stay up for a while for the students to be inspired during exams.
Here’s the kicker, Neumann and Turpin are exempt from exams this year because of their marks but they both noticed a growing amount of stress among the students, and they wanted to help others.
Both are members of the Kinark Leadership Group, a foundation of children and youth support. “They’ve gone away every year to be trained at the [Kinark Outdoor Centre] by our staff and their staff,” said Ray Este, FFSS’s principal. “This was their idea that they came up with in terms of trying to help improve the school climate.” Este tweeted out about this surprise, saying: You have to love coming into Fenelon Falls SS on the Monday am before exams and seeing the lockers covered [with] positive inspiring messages.”
“We were supposed to make a learning goal that we wanted to help the school become a better place, so Alyson and I decided that we would put up some inspirational posts to boost people’s confidence before exam time,” said Ruby. “It was exciting to find out what people’s reactions were going to be to it.”
“I was hoping it’d have a good reaction and I think it did,” said Turpin.
According to Neuman and Turpin, the message they are trying to convey is a combination of “You can succeed” and “Succeeding takes hard work”.
The girls both said they enjoyed their first year of high school, and they are ready for the next three years, when exams will be mandatory.
