Last year, the Archer Honor Education Council decided to pick a different word every month to involve the community and encourage them to voice their opinions. The word for this October is “advocacy.”

Cameron Thompson, one of the 11th grade representatives, defines advocacy as “standing up for something that you believe in or speaking up for yourself and taking [an individual] stance on an issue.”

Thompson’s job on the Honor Council is to educate the community, and she thinks that having a word of the month is a great way to keep the council organized and involve the Archer community.

“[The Honor Education Council] thought that if we had one word [relating] to ethics, it would spark a conversation in the community about different issues,” Thompson said.

Marine Yamada, the senior chair of the council, said, “Archer girls have brilliant ideas and they have so many opinions that are worth sharing.”

According to Yamada, the honor council has been hearing a lot of great ideas and valuable opinions but were seeing that some of them weren’t being acted upon.

“Archer girls do have the power to make a difference,” Yamada said. “[This] starts with advocacy, which goes beyond just speaking out on an issue — it’s doing something with your opinion and with your thoughts.”

Yamada said that they chose the word advocacy because it “correlated well” with the skirt length discussion that the upper school had during community connections. In these discussions, students were given the opportunity to advocate for themselves, and the Honor Council wanted to keep this trend going.

“As us Archer girls mature into adulthood, we must learn how to advocate — not only for ourselves, but for causes we strongly believe in and changes we want to see in the world, as well as changes we want for ourselves,” Thompson said.

She continued, “If we can’t advocate for ourselves or our beliefs, we won’t see progression that could better the future.”