While most students were enjoying their first weekend of the new school year at home and at the beach, student leaders spent their back-to-school weekend…back at school.

Leaders of the ASKSM Student Government, Peer Mediation Team, National Honor Society, and HOSA club participated in an overnight leadership retreat August 10-11 at the Kamehameha Schools Maui High School campus.

“It was both fun and educational,” ASKSM Vice President James Krueger said.

Students participated in a variety of team-building activities with KS Maui Outreach Counselor Venus Rosete-Medeiros.

“We learned more about our classmates and we had a lot of trust exercises which were really fun and good,” said Sai Furukawa, HOSA Vice President and NHS Treasurer and Sergeant-At-Arms.

The activities that got the most excitement out of the students were the trust exercises. In groups of nine, students would lie down on the floor and trust their eight counterparts to lift them up and bring them back down safely.

This exercise proved vital in the next game: a mission to Uranus. One group of fourteen students imagined they were stuck on the planet, and with quick teamwork, each person had to evacuate through one of eighteen holes in a web.

Another group imagined being back on Earth, having just conquered the world. They had canoe trouble and had to call on a tired ‘aumakua to guide them back to shore.

This entailed the students hopping onto a narrow plank and reorganizing themselves into alphabetical order without falling overboard. Any mishaps resulted in a consequence, such as the binding of both arms or putting on a pair of blackout goggles.

After dinner, the students headed to the Charles Reed Bishop Learning Center for a discussion game.

Ms. Priscilla Mikell, one of the chaperones for the event, said the student responses “really gave me hope.”

The students then got the opportunity to leave behind cryptic survival messages to other groups. Each group had to interpret another group’s survival message, and based on that, the chaperones decided whether each group would live or die.

The next morning, it was down to business for the leaders. Working with Student Activities Coordinator Mrs. Naomi Ashman, everyone learned how to write activity proposals, which they use to bring suggestions to school administration.

Afterwards, everyone critiqued the Homecoming judging rubrics, to ensure fair and friendly competition between the classes. In the end, only they only  made two small changes.

One was to change the wording on the float rubric to reflect that the float is to be constructed on a plywood platform, not a Mule.

The other was to lower the penaltyfor going overtime during boys cheeleading from 10 points to 5 points.

“It was very helpful and a great experience, and I like the way it was put together,” Sophomore Class Representative Tana Tua said.