With a variety of clubs offered to students, a new club emerges along with new ideas and goals hoping to better both our school and community. CT Youth Forum is a club run by history teacher Patrick Mulcahy, consisting of a group of students with skill sets including both leadership and discussion skills.

  “The CT Youth Forum’s main purpose as a club is to get high schoolers engaged in meaningful discussion with peers from around the state about relevant issue to their own lives or the global community in general. At FHS, however, CT Youth Forum serves a secondary purpose, working as a part of a larger group called Face2Face,” Mulcahy said.

  Students travel to different high schools, discussing a topic that is usually controversial.

  Face2Face hopes to open their own forum event to the public as they would like to get both the school and community involved.

  “The purpose of Face2Face is to bring open conversations on unique topics to FHS. The name ‘Face2Face’ originated from how we are bringing people with a great amount of knowledge on specific topics to FHS so that we can discuss these subjects face to face with people who are experts in that field,” freshman Bryce Cullen said.

  Members of the club and Mulcahy hope to reach out to students by making them aware of both what goes on during a forum and the benefits of going to one.

  “The upcoming forum that will be held at FHS will be modeled off of a traditional CT Forum, in which a few select guest speakers are invited to be on stage with the plan a moderator, and they discuss a broad topic that has significance to the audience,” Mulcahy said.

  These moderators are people with a professional background or are well known and have a certain stance on the topic at hand.

  Face2Face members have been working to plan this forum to also have audience involvement in order to keep the discussion engaging.

  “In addition to the proposed questions from the moderator and the speakers themselves, audience members will have an opportunity to propose questions to the guest speakers,”

Mulcahy said.

  Students have been planning this forum by meeting with Student Activities Director Carl Johnson and Assistant Superintendent Kim Wynne with goals to set up the layout of the forum and publicize.

  Although the planning process is still underway with hope of also involving students from other clubs, sophomore Maggie McGuire is a member of the CT Youth Forum and also is working on the specifics of the event such as furniture and stage layout for the guest speakers.

  “I hope that we have a good turnout and that we get the audience engaged in our forum and that they will want to come back for our next one,” McGuire said.

  Mulcahy said, “The forum presents an amazing opportunity for both students, parents and community members to connect face to face with one another over a shared interest in a topic, a rare thing to happen in our increasingly busy technological world.”