Building fun with Team Spirit

Northeast Vernon County High School students learn valuable life skills like patience, communication, trust and respect while walking a moving ladder during a team building exercise held Wednesday, Oct. 28, as part of the Red Ribbon Week celebration at the school. --Rusty Murry/Daily Mail

Students at Northeast Vernon County High School spent most of the morning on Wednesday, Oct. 28, celebrating Red Ribbon Week by participating in a number of team-building activities sponsored by the student-led Team Spirit and the Army National Guard.

The purpose of this event is for students "to build teams within the school so kids can rely on each other for support," according to Gina Naas, counselor at NEVC. Also, "students need to know that there are a lot of ways to have fun without using drugs," Naas said.

The event was directed by Technical Sergeant Jason Henke. Henke is part of the Army National Guard's Counter Drug Task Force and is based in Kansas City. Henke takes his team building event to schools and not for profit events in the western half of the state throughout the year. Sometimes they will just provide the equipment for an event.

Henke begins by asking students what elements a team needs to be successful. Students came up with trust, respect, communication, patience and leaders. Henke agreed that all of those are valuable to a team, but he specified that a team needs a leader and not a boss, saying that "a boss tells you what to do; a leader sets an example."

The sergeant broke the first 50 students into smaller groups and set them to work as teams on the several different tasks which were each observed by a member of Team Spirit that had recently attended a team leadership conference. Each small group was given 10 minutes at each station before being rotated to the next. The object wasn't to complete each challenge but to learn to work together. There were no winners or losers.

The challenges were varied in their strategy and level of difficulty, but all were designed to teach the group to work together to reach a common goal. One task had the group rolling a ball through several sections of PVC pipe held end to end, another had them balancing on a diamond shaped framework of lumber.

Still another had one student walking on pieces of pipe held between two students much like a moving horizontal ladder. As soon as the student got off one piece of pipe the holders moved to the front of the line and kept the walker going. A similar method was used for the ball in a pipe exercise. When the ball exited his or her pipe, the student went to the front of the line thereby allowing the ball to keep moving down the pipe.

While this large group of students was in the gym learning team building skills, the rest of the student body was in the cafeteria watching a film on the consequences of driving while intoxicated. After the first groups had made the circuit of all the stations, they watched the film and everyone else got to learn the team building and leadership skills. "There is a lot of research to back up this experiential learning and it teaches students a number of skills that will be helpful later in life," said Henke.