By Kaylyn Pageot

Recently Greensboro College (GC) has come off spring break, and you know what that means? Messy dorms, piles of laundry, dirty dishes and so much more stress now that we are finishing up the rest of the school year. The Students Honors Organization (SHO) has the perfect solution to your mess and tension with their National Spring Cleaning Week! From March 22 to March 28 SHO hosted fun events and activities. This helped GC students have a fresh start to the rest of their school year and also gave them an opportunity to show appreciation to those who help our school stay clean year-round. 

Sunday’s event was a campus clean up as GC students got the opportunity to help clean up around West Hall. The vice president of SHO, Shaniah Taylor, had this to say about how her thoughts on the event “Even though we did not get a huge turnout and it was just us SHO members, we picked up trash until we did not see anymore — making our campus a better place to live in. I hope others can take our example and do the small stuff like picking up trash whenever they see it and refrain from littering.” 

On Monday, SHO students showed up in the cafeteria lobby to give students the opportunity to write thank you’s to the custodial staff here at GC. These notes were then placed in appreciation bags which had items like candies, hand sanitizer and a drink. After everything was packaged, the SHO officers handed them out to the custodial staff. This event was to help show the custodial staff here at GC that all the students know the value of their services and are thankful for having such a dedicated staff. 

Tuesday night students got to take a nice break in the Student Center (STU) and got to show off their knowledge about cleaning. SHO hosted a game night with fun board games and a jeopardy game with categories all about cleaning. The winner got a $10 gift card to spend on anything they liked; however, it was slightly encouraged that they bought something cleaning related.

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Wednesday SHO worked with another club on campus, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), to help students show appreciation to staff with thank you cards and flower seeds. Students crowded around tables writing sweet letters to coaches, professors, staff and more. Then they were able to pick different seed packets to give out with their thank you cards. 

Thursday was SHO’s bread and butter, as they hosted a ProfTalk with head resident hall director Andrew Maynor. His prof talked focused around “spring cleaning your mental health” and he led a discussion where he talked about building good habits and setting goals. SHO officer and Copy Editor for the Collegian, Brielle Thomas, had this to say on her thoughts of the prof talk “This was a talk on spring cleaning of the mind to correlate with our awareness of national spring cleaning week. I think this was a beautiful and intriguing way to start the conversation of mental health and helping ourselves with young adults.” 

Friday SHO hosted a donation drive in cafeteria lobby for the Room at The Inn, a licensed homeless shelter for pregnant women in Greensboro. To make it easier for students to donate SHO created a box that they could carry with them for the rest of the week. SHO collected supplies like maternity items, hygiene products and many more items that would be helpful to those at the shelter.

Saturday SHO not only showed support for GC’s lacrosse teams, but they also held a tailgating event with the donations box for the locals’ women’s resource center. SHO officer Hailie Misplay also made cookies for the pennies for purpose event, where students could pay for sweet treats while giving back to a local charity. 

Overall, the spring cleaning event for GC students was a refreshing way to start off the rest of the semester. It gave students the opportunity to not only get involved in having a cleaner campus but also helped them to show appreciation to those who work behind the scenes. Now that students are able to breathe fresh air, they can get ready for the work they have to put in to end this school year on a squeaky clean slate