The Milpitas Misfits meet every Tuesday to practice hip-hop choreographies made by its members. The turnout of attendees filled the L-circle of the MHS campus, allowing them to thrive as an unchartered club.
By: Ryanna Lui
MHS offers a wide variety of clogs, the campus term for clubs and organizations, to its diverse student body. But not everyone chooses to go through the intricate and lengthy process of chartering offered a few times every school year by the Associated Student Body, or ASB, for several long hours. This process officially acknowledges clogs in exchange for paperwork, officer training, and mandatory involvement in ASB activities throughout the school year. Those who do not register are called unchartered clogs. Some currently unchartered clogs include the Milpitas Misfits, Science Olympiad, and the Pilipino United Student Organization, or PUSO.
Although the Milpitas Misfits, a hip-hop club, has previously chartered, they reasoned that the benefits granted by the school did not outweigh the heavy paperwork that preceded it, according to Milpitas Misfits Co-President Emily Yap. The sheer amount of paperwork that was necessary for funds was a huge hassle, Yap continued.
“I feel like the work for chartering is kind of excessive because we have to do a lot of documents and [write] a Constitution,” Yap said. “There’s a lot of writing. We always have to ask to do certain things. We can just do them on our own if we are unchartered.”
Officer training is another obstacle of the chartering process, Science Olympiad Captain Lisa Yan said. This holds especially true for seasoned cabinet members, Yan said.
“[Officer training] is a lot of the same information we get every year and for returning officers it’s mostly very boring,” Yan said. “Chartering information could be sent out more reliably.”
The PUSO cabinet members encountered a different predicament – they turned in their paperwork for rechartering, but found out they were unchartered a few weeks into the school year, PUSO Treasurer Paul Soriano said. They were not warned about their new status, even though they had been chartered the previous year, Soriano continued.
“We turned in our paperwork for recharting last May, and [ASB] never got back to us or emailed us,” Soriano stated. “Maggie, who was the one who took our papers, said, ‘Ok, you guys are good,’ so we thought we would be chartered. But Congress came, the first one, and we weren’t chartered. I’m assuming that they lost our papers.”
This was a major setback for PUSO, which had big plans for fundraising during the tranquility of first semester, Soriano said. They will be chartering in November, in preparation for second semester, he stated.
“We can’t hold official meetings,” Soriano said. “We can’t do approval of funds. We can’t do any fundraisers. The biggest thing is that we can’t hold meetings because we want to start developing our bond with our members. I’m upset, personally, because we had a lot of plans this year. This club was just restarted three years ago, so we didn’t have as much funds as we did back when it was still up and running.”
For those who choose to remain unchartered, restrictions are nearly nonexistent, Milpitas Misfits Co-President Christian Abella said. The performances that the Milpitas Misfits partake in can be used as an example, he said.
“We can always collab with outside groups and not be restricted by our local area,” Abella elaborated.
With permission from the school administration, unchartered organizations can officially represent the school, according to Yan. The Science Olympiad advisor takes care of most issues with the principal instead of ASB, she continued.
“We do get approval from the administration so our advisor talks to Mr. Rojas about the funds and how to register for competitions,” Yan said. “Even though we’re not chartered, we are an official organization of the school.”
Regardless of whether a club has school support, word of mouth proves to be effective in advertising a club, Yap stated. The Milpitas Misfits also take advantage of the hype of the biannual clog rush event, Yap continued.
“During clog rush time we like to go in front of the theater and perform with our dance mat,” Yap said. “[We] try to tell others what hip hop club is, and we advertise on social media and such.”