The Appreciating Cultures and Ethnicities (ACE) Club is giving a voice to students in school and is slowly but surely changing school culture to create a welcoming and positive environment.
When former student Leah Teffera approached librarian, and now advisor, Ellen Sheehy about creating a club that supports students of different cultures and ethnicities, ACE Club was born.
Eight years later, the club is now run by President junior Joyce Messak, Vice Presidents juniors Juliette Lai and Neva Partal, as well as executive board members.
Typical meetings usually include introductions and icebreakers to help newer members feel more comfortable. They then discuss any current projects they have or bring up topics related to ethnicity. These could be ideas for school wide celebrati
ons, or could be issues like teachers scheduling tests on a religious holiday.
Messak said, “[We discuss] things that are happening in the real world that we don’t really have any other space to really talk about. Like it might be difficult to talk about with our parents or teachers, so we kind of just have that space to talk about it amongst ourselves.”
The club is hoping to begin an ACE Club in 7th and 8th grades, and are also working on a flag project in the high school.
Partal said, “I feel like most of of the cultures are underrepresented. And I feel like if some students
see their flag displayed somewhere that everyone can see it, it’s a good way for people to feel known and acknowledged.”
The flag project will be a collection of flags to represent the student body, collected through surveys, and hung in the school library.
Some of their club values are inclusion, the wellbeing of students, integrity, but also joy. ACE Club is somewhere where students’ voices can be heard, but it’s also a place where they can come together and celebrate their differences.
Despite the fact that ACE Club had never been a tremendously large group of students, both Messak and Sheehy expressed their excitement about the rise in memberships so far this year.
Sheehy said, “We’re hovering around like 15 or 20 students per meeting. It’s still early in the year but it’s a lovely representation of freshman through seniors, there’s an allyship, not every student is a student of color, and it’s also just a lovely representation of different countries of origin and different cultures.”
One major accomplishment of the ACE Club is the multicultural potluck they had hosted last year with the support of some other clubs. With 18 different cultural dishes representing different countries, they ate, played trivia, and had a student DJ.
Messak hopes to hold more of these potlucks this year as well.
In addition to food celebrations, the club also played a large part in more serious ways that impacted Masco administration. After the murder of George Floyd, the school committee had decided to create an Anti-Racism and Equity policy, and asked for the input from the ACE club members.
Those students ended up writing a 7 page document, presented it to the school committee, and much of the language from it was used in the policy. Sheehy mentions this to new members every year to show them how they can have a direct impact in their community.
To both Messak and Sheehy, ACE club stands out from other clubs at Masco because it isn’t focused on a specific language or subject.
Sheehy said, “The club is unique. It focuses more on the students’ experience here at Masco, and creates a community you know because it is an allyships.”
Messak said that she began attending meetings because of the other members.
Messak said, “They all made me want to stay because they were so welcoming and they were so kind and I was learning about things that I didn’t know before.”
In the future, ACE Club plans on continuing to grow, having more members to help more or the student body be represented, no matter race, ethnicity, religion, etc. They also hope that through their continued advocacy, they will soon have as great an impact as the student council, hopefully making Masco a place where everyone knows that they are seen and heard.