This article was published by Otis Loga, a senior in the journalism class.
The U32 Senior lounge is located in the middle of the school’s auditorium and is unique and special for every senior class for different reasons. Juniors always look into the senior lounge to see what they can do and what it might be like next year when they will be seniors and will get this privilege. “I was looking forward to having a space where I could kind of just chill out,” Hazen Stoufer said, a senior that uses the lounge.
U32 has always had a senior lounge or some place for seniors to go to hang out. The lounge used to be located somewhere else in the school. The room that it’s used to now used to be a blue table room.
The senior lounge used to be “where we display art, sometimes sort of the corner between the library and which is now the English wing. So there used to be couches there, and that was sort of based as the senior lounge,” said Jes Wills, the assistant principal.
This year the lounge has been closed three times due to messiness and damage to the school property. “When it gets closed I understand why it does, because a lot of bad stuff can happen in here, but it’s not every student,” said James Driscoll.
Jes and students were getting tired of the lounge getting closed and seeing Jes’s emails informing them that the senior lounge is closed. As a result of that, there were seniors who volunteered to be senior representatives to take part of the control of the space. The representatives worked with the student body to come up with the list of rules that were posted on the senior lounge wall.
The main rules that the representatives and students came up with were respecting other seniors and people and respecting the space within the school property. “So four seniors stepped up to help manage that [the space and the behavior], so they could hold each other accountable,” said Jes.
Here at U32 it is great “for seniors to have their own space, senior privileges,” said Jes. “When I first came to the senior lounge, I thought it was nice that I’d have a good place to study,” said James Driscoll, a senior student that uses the lounge.
This year especially the senior lounge has been used by many of the same people.“I use it most free bands of mine. I just use it as a chill place to hang out with my friends and get a break from doing work,” said Cole Hayes, a senior who also uses the lounge.
Teachers and staff do not go into that room very much. They like to allow the senior lounge only for seniors and keep it a safe space for seniors to talk about things that are related to being a senior. Jes said “It’s nice for seniors to have a place where they can talk about the things that only impact seniors, like what they are doing after they graduate.”
