At the start of each school year, Lawrence High’s Link Crew leaders greet incoming students with smiles and enthusiasm. This year, they aimed to build on that tradition by taking it a step further and reintroducing the Link Crew class.
This class, also known as “Chesty’s Den,” was reintroduced after three years and occurs during fifth hour for chosen students.
The class was first led in 2012 by history teacher and Link Crew coordinator Valerie Schrag, but ended after the Fall 2022 semester due to budget cuts. These budget cuts meant the social studies department lost teaching positions, and Schrag no longer had a class period to dedicate to the Link class.
This year, Link Crew coordinators and students were determined to bring the class back.
“We wanted to bring back school spirit, so a few kids went to Coach Trowbridge, and said, ‘we really want this to happen,’ and she was on board with it,” Chesty’s Den senior Aaminah Ahmed said.
This year’s class is being taught by academic interventionist Audrey Trowbridge, whose extensive social work background and availability made her a natural fit. Trowbridge said her decision was driven by her “general love for Lawrence High” to teach the class.
Despite the Link Crew class being taught by Schrag in previous years, Trowbridge described Schrag as being “really supportive of handing it over, and letting me take a stab at it.”
Trowbridge likes having students in both the Link Crew and Chesty’s Den program because it encourages students to set school expectations by leading by example.
“Letting the message about how we do things around here come from kids and peers is way more powerful than us doing it as adults in an assembly at the beginning of the year,” Trowbridge said.
While there are similarities between Link Crew and Chesty’s Den, students find that Link Crew is targeted towards incoming students, and Chesty’s Den serves the school community as a whole.
“I would say we’re not just directed towards freshmen, we’re directed towards everyone, and we want to include everyone,” Chesty’s Den junior Aubrey Atherton said.
Chesty’s Den students are broken up into different committees and groups, each with different tasks in each group that they have to accomplish.
“Some groups are in charge of planning the schedule, some groups are in charge of making the schedule for who’s going to work on what day. We have everything,” Trowbridge said.
Atherthon also emphasized the amount of hard work and dedication that goes into the class.
“I want people to know how hard we work behind the scenes,” Atherthon said. “Every day we actually work on something, we’re not just messing around.”
In addition to extensive in-class work, attendance at school dances and sporting events is required for Chesty’s Den students.
“I feel like it’s very interactive, and it gives us that leeway to go out and like to show up for your students and show up for your friends, whether they’re your friends or not,” Ahmed said.
On top of their own participation, they also work hard to get fellow students involved.
“I hope we accomplish getting people out to the games and just get people more involved in our school,” Atherton said.
In addition to increasing school event attendance, the class has organized a sand volleyball tournament, a campus cleanup, worked with Lion Time classes, and runs social media accounts to promote Chesty’s Den.
“We’ve accomplished going into Lion Time and going in there to interact with students,” Ahmed said. “I feel like that’s been a big hit.”
At the start of the year, the class focused on cleaning up the campus before the Free State vs. Lawrence High football game.
“One of our main things we said we wanted to do was help clean up the campus and make it a better place for everyone, cleaner and safer,” Ahmed said.
Above everything else, the biggest initiative the class has taken on this year is furthering school spirit.
“We’ve accomplished people wearing red and black on Fridays, which is a tradition for our school that had kind of died,” Atherton said.
One of the things that students’ grades are based on in Chesty’s Den is their school spirit,
“We get points if we wear red and black, so that’s our big thing, wearing red and black every Friday,” Ahmed said.
Many find that the biggest benefit of being in Chesty’s Den is leadership training and a built-in community.
“It gains you confidence in speaking up and sharing your opinion, because it’s important everywhere,” Atherton said.
Ahmed appreciates the support from her peers that she gets from the class.
“I think the support that we all get from each other and that we show for each other really shapes us as a class,” Ahmed said.
A key initiative of Chesty’s Den is to maintain inclusion at LHS while being a selective class.
“I feel like a lot of people think that we’re trying to be exclusive. I think people just need to understand that it was an application,” Ahmed said.
The diversity of different students involved in Chesty’s Den helps them work as a team.
“It’s brought a lot of people together and helped us come back to our traditions in the school,” Atherton said.
Looking ahead, Trowbridge aims for the class to leave a lasting impact.
“My biggest hope is that we establish a kind of new norm of what it means to be a Chesty Lion,” Trowbridge said.
