The Multicultural Student Club’s (MSC) first event of the year is already underway, with a photo contest worth up to $50 lined up as the main prize and a chalk-out event coming up this weekend.

Lead teacher José Coss spoke about the motivations of these events. “I think that the importance of the activity comes out of a place where, I think, we haven’t promoted the club enough in recent years,” Coss said. “Anything that we do will be better than not doing anything at all. As it stands, well, we are kind of in a trial and error period, so my objective in all of this is to get you guys and the students to start working things. The important thing is that we’re doing things and putting ourselves out there. Then, we can go through a trial and error period where we can say, ‘Oh, this works. Oh, this could improve in this sense.’ And then we get a better idea of how to move forward,” added Coss.

The first set of events features a photo contest centered on Lake Placid’s nature and diversity, followed by a chalk-out event outside the school. “Every activity that we do can become a building block into the broader scheme of things,” Coss said. “It’s good to have a nice activity where we can actually get a lot of students together. We’re considering making it a language lab cultural activity, so that we also get people from the language lab–I think that would make for great promo,” Coss added.

“I think that the idea of promoting diversity and nature, living in Lake Placid and trying to link all of these concepts is good way to promote the diversity that we have in the student body and in this in the staff, in the faculty, but also like trying to address that diversity that also lives within the broader Lake Placid community, which I think is our main objective, trying to link the school to the community through our diversity, because there’s so much diversity in Lake Placid,” Coss said. Sometimes it’s more visible than others, but you go to restaurants or any store in town, and you’ll notice that there are people from all over the world working, and those are the people that make the town come alive,” he added.

Overall, these events are part of MSC’s broader mission to raise awareness about how essential Northwood and Lake Placid’s diversity is to the community. “Businesses are successful because they can hire people from all over the world, and that makes up a very important part of the town,” Coss said, “just as the diversity makes a very important part of the school. Promoting diversity, I think, is super important, especially in this day and age. What we’re trying to do with the activities is promote diversity, find any way that we can get people to think about this: through a photo contest, through a chalk-out, things like that. We can send the message that our diversity matters and is super important for the student body and for the broader community,” Coss added.

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Enter the MSC photo contest here: https://forms.gle/6Ev8qp6ky3choHcx5