In Model UN, students debate world issues. In Student Government, students practice self governance. In Shakespeare Slam, students perform Shakespeare. In none of these clubs, or any other clubs at Parker, do they celebrate, enjoy, and learn about pickles, until now. This fall, sophomore Jojo Husbeck, head of Pickle Club, started the group to do just that.
Husbeck wanted to create a club where “people could be happy and find joy through a stressful day.” She felt that a club like the Pickle Club would be able to achieve this goal and “be a fun place for people to relieve their stress.”
Pickle Club is one of 18 unique clubs introduced this year and has managed to gain much attention from the student body. This year, new clubs make up 36% of the total clubs at Parker.
The clubs take hours of planning to create. The current heads didn’t bring up the idea of creating a club; instead, the idea was mentioned by Upper School history teacher Susan Elliot. “The idea originally came to us while on the tenth-grade retreat bus,” Husbeck said. Sophomores Brady Kass, Nia Nashashibi, Mia Vitacek, and Jojo Husbeck are the heads of the Pickle Club and were “sharing their passions about pickles on the bus when Ms. Elliot said that we should start a club.”
When they returned home after the retreat, the heads began planning the intricacies of the club. After having a very successful kickoff meeting with Bruno, they got right to starting the student organization.
“Planning the first meeting was a little messy because we didn’t know how to get access to the budget, so we had to buy the pickles by ourselves,” Husbeck said. “We even forgot forks and had to have someone run to get them in the middle of it.”
After over 32 students came to the first meeting, the heads started planning the next few meetings. They wanted to ensure that members were having fun while still focusing on the topic of pickles. “One of our goals is to try and have new themes for our meetings.
One example is the pickle raffle, where you can bring a pickle from your home for people to vote on,” Husbeck said.
Bruno organizes all Parker clubs and has the final say in the creation of all clubs. He believes that student-run organizations are “extremely important” and not offering them would be “doing the students a disservice.” Bruno claims that “as much learning takes place outside the classroom, as it does inside.”
Some may view the creation of Pickle Club as a joke and purely to put on a college application, but Bruno has taken measures to prevent that from occurring. “A club needs to meet at least three to five times in a semester for it to be considered a club,” Bruno said. He strongly believes in the students and relies on their moral compass, to not create a club that has no future goals.
Bruno has also made the process of creating a student-lead organization very simple. “The process is not meant to be a hindrance, the process is meant to be there to support and foster the creation of clubs. And so if students have an interest in a certain activity, I’m happy to help make that happen for them,” Bruno said.
Senior Alex Fidler has been at Parker since kindergarten and shared her opinions on the clubs at Parker. While she feels “Fake clubs at Parker are a real problem,” she doesn’t see any issue with Pickle Club. Many of the clubs are primarily educationally focused but she feels like “non-academic clubs like Baking Club, Chess Club, Italian Club etc. are great for the student body.”
