SHOS (Silverhawks Helping Other Silverhawks) has been cancelled due to the increasing number of freshmen at Southwest this year. 

Lincoln Southwest is one of the few schools that still has open enrollment, causing class sizes to continuously get bigger. Class numbers have been continuously increasing over the years, making the SHOS program grow and become too large to handle. Southwest’s freshman class has roughly 539 students this year.

“It has just grown to the point where without more support systems in place, and teachers to help supervise, it is just getting to be too much for one person to do,” social studies teacher Lisa Bales, who was previously the director of SHOS, said.

SHOS was a program to help freshmen get to know the school and its policies better. 

Older students called “SHOS leaders” would instruct groups of freshmen after school every Tuesday during early dismissal. According to Bales, teaching students by students enabled the school to teach students in a more engaging way. 

“We were finding that so much of what we did in the sessions we could get to the kids in a different venue.”

Some SHOS leaders saw the program as an opportunity both for themselves and the incoming freshmen.

“I wanted to include something on my college application that showed I assumed a leadership role, and then I also wanted to improve my communication and confident speaking to other people,” junior Drew Snyder said. “I do not think ending SHOS was a good idea because I think it provided a gateway into Southwest that made freshmen more comfortable, rather than just throwing them into a new environment that they haven’t experienced before.”

However, not all students felt the same way about the program. Some did not think the program was beneficial at all.

“I don’t think it was very helpful in the first place,” said senior Emily Udell. “When I was a freshman my SHOS leaders did not follow the curriculum, and when I was a SHOS leader there was lots of crazy, disrespectful freshmen that were all very rude.” 

Although SHOS is done for now, Bales believes it could start up again in a new way. However, one necessity is more teacher teacher involvement. 

“So we just had to re-evaluate how we were gonna do it,” she said. “I don’t think it’s completely off the table at looking at something like that, but we’re hoping that the way we disseminate information to our freshmen we can do more intentionally, and some of that really does need to be teacher driven.”