Honors English 9 Sample Proposal- Broken Down by Outline Topics

Honors English 9 Sample Proposal- Broken Down by Outline Topics

Topic 1: Introduction
Topic 2: Background and Research
Topic 3: Timeline
Topic 4: Audience
Topic 5: Solution- Senior year portion of project, as well as junior year persuasive paper
Topic 6: Conclusion- How does it relate to BHS motto? / It is another spirit day at BashaHigh School. I walk through the hallways, and see seas of not green and gold, but a plethora of colors and brand names. Wearing a Basha Bear Tennis shirt myself, I am disappointed by the lack of uniformity, by the lack of spirit. Spirit days are meant to bring the school together in one cause- promoting community. I don’t feel like I am a part of this community today, but rather an outsider because I am one of the few students to take the Friday tradition seriously. With over 20 sports teams and 30 clubs, it is sad to see so few people taking pride in the amazing opportunities the school provides. School morale, or school spirit, is something that is seriously lacking in our school. I know that it may just be “high school”, and that some of the students don’t want to be here in the first place, but how could I encourage others to support not just the school colors, but education and learning in general? In what ways could I encourage change? How would change make our school improve overall? I choose to research school spirit and how it impacts student learning, as well as how lack of school spirit (in other words, support) could negatively impact the education we receive.
Being a fairly new school, Basha has not had a long time in history to develop a true identity as a school. We are the third child of the district, a child that is sometimes, psychologically speaking, left out and neglected. “They may feel squeezed out of a position of privilege or lost in the crowd” (Isaacson). Although this metaphor does not apply precisely, being that we are a school and not a human, I feel as though we were set up to feel like less of a school. We have to, after all, compete with the athletic superstars of Hamilton, and Chandler is the oldest high school in Arizona. Mr. Ken James, principal, states that “We want to find our own gimic, something that draws in people to Basha”. But what do we have going for our school?
Well, for one, we have amazing academic program. In 2010, BashaHigh School was ranked number 6 in the State of Arizona for AP Scores and Programs (Newsweek). This was only beat by small charter and private schools. We also have 22 AP classes, 77% of our teachers have Master’s Degrees (James), and we had 14 AP Scholars last year (Wattawa). If you ask any of the students in the honors or AP program, you will hear mostly good reviews of teachers and classes. In the competitive marketplace of education, this is an advantage of which everyone in this school needs to be aware.
Over the next three years, I will be working on not just figuring out what our school spirit status is, but how to work to change it. I am going to do some in-depth research, including interviewing students and teachers from our school and other high schools. I plan to survey the student body, to take lunchtime polls, and to research sources online and through journals on student leadership. I hope that by conducting this in-depth research sophomore year, I will be able to come up with a solid and clearly defined solution for my senior year. I hope that the research I conduct provides insight for my paper junior year. I won’t really know how to fix the problem until I know what its source is. This paper can then be shared with fellow students, teachers, and parents to help them to see the urgency in doing something about this issue.
Parents, community members, and most important staff and students should have a clearer understanding of the benefits of attending Basha. Not only do we need to explain the stastistics more, but we need to promote all the positive accomplishments of the school. I want to get into the mind of that student who talks about how much he hates school, and change it. I want to reach out to the hard working athletes and gain more support for their activities. I will be sharing this research with many students to convince them that change needs to happen, and that it is possible. As a senior, my target audience is my peers, the other members of Basha High. I want to not just get students involved, but also teachers and other staff members. Imagine if all our teachers took on the challenge as well as the students!
After I have successfully figured out a reason for this problem, I hope that my solution will be more effective. Senior year I will start a full-force spirit campaign, built with the input of our own student body. My final goal would be to see a spirit Friday with 100% involvement, but even 95% would be a success. I will promote the positive qualities of Basha on my own between now and then, but I hope that I can use electronic resources such as Facebook and Twitter to form an underground society dedicated to helping improve school morale and spirit. We will promote positivity through action and also through our words. We will lead by example. It will be impossible to avoid the spirit. My project will be easy to document because it will be public, it will be logged in Facebook and Twitter, and we will of course take pictures to post on our school website to show how much spirit has improved! I also plan to take before and after pictures and survey the students at the beginning and end of the school year to get their feedback on the changes.
BashaHigh School chose the motto of Benevolence, Honor, and Scholarship not because it goes along with the letters “BHS” but because we want to truly uphold these standards. Scholarship is easy, evident in what I found already in my research, and evident in the fact that I will be conducting in-depth research over three full years to immerse myself in my own education. Honor comes into play when I honor my school, my classmates, and my staff by wanting to improve the school. I hope that this will in turn help the community honor us with awards and continued support. Lastly, benevolence means kindness, and I think that with extra morale, our school will see fewer problems with bullying and more unity. If we can take a stand together by wearing our colors with pride, then we can take a stand together on other issues.