According to Xing “Melody” Gao, next year’s Key Club president and junior, Key Club will have a casual ice cream party to celebrate the end of the school year with its members. Members are allowed to walk in and out, and they may pick up their certificate if they completed 40 hours of volunteering. However, if members didn’t complete all 40 hours, they’re not kicked out of the club.

This year’s Key Club faced a challenge that it will continue to address in the future, according to Key Club co-sponsor Jill Grimes, and that challenge was size. Key Club is the largest club at this school with over 500 students. Grimes said it is over 10 percent of the CHS student population. Due to its size that keeps growing every year, Key Club has to organize itself in order to send information out to all of its members.

“We’re looking at actually creating kind of a specific role. We have a president, we have a vice president and we have a secretary. We’re looking at creating a communications officer, somebody who will kind of oversee,” Grimes said. “We have an email, we have a webpage, we have a Facebook account, we have a Twitter account and we collect phone numbers from people when they are volunteering to try and send out a text message, ‘Hey, don’t forget. This is your time that you’re going to bell-ring,’ or whatever the activity is. And you’ve got five other people (volunteering), and multiple of that’s going on.”

According to Gao, Key Club’s biggest accomplishment is getting many people together to work for a greater cause. Despite its size, Gao said she felt closer to the club after becoming the Junior Board Member since she got to see how students ran it. Grimes helps with organization and communication, but Key Club is 100 percent student-driven, according to Grimes.

Gao said she plans to prepare for her role as Key Club president over the summer. She said she wants to focus on how to execute her future duties and how to stay organized.

“This year, I felt like Kern (Vohra, Key Club president and senior) did a good job to keep everything organized. And these next couple of weeks I really want to learn from him and see how he stays organized and keeps everything together because it’s such a large club,” Gao said. “And I just want to run it like officially and have people be really involved.”

Besides its ice cream party, Key Club has no other large events planned due to final exams. At that point of the year, Grimes said the club is done at being a student organization.

Although Grimes said she encourages members to volunteer over the summer, members cannot earn all 40 hours before school starts: it’s capped.

Grimes said, “If (students are) interested in joining next year, it’s usually a couple of weeks after school is in session. Give everybody a chance to get used to their schedule; give me a chance to get used to my schedule, all that kind of stuff. Usually Labor Day is when we have the call-out meeting.”