Exhausted students create foolproof plan to make faculty understand horrors of Impact Week

No matter how good of a thing Impact Week is, any student can only do so much service. With long days of manual labor, the last thing anyone wants to do is sit down and listen to a speech for 30 minutes while getting yelled at to stay awake. 

As a Catholic school dedicated to service, Impact Week is a requirement for freshmen, sophomores, and juniors at Mount Carmel. Students must go into various service sites and contribute their time and labor to help these organizations for a week. As nice as this sounds on paper, this truly doesn’t capture the magical  essence of Impact Week for the student. 

Waking up early, packing a lunch because no lunch will not be given at any site, getting to school, and packing yourself next to all of your classmates to get a 45-minute presentation from either Mr. John Stimler or Mr. Matthew Petrich on a subject that is incredibly hard to follow, all before 9:00 am. This is repeated for an entire week. Yet, the late start Monday is incredibly clutch. Students have finally broken and made the faculty members who put them through this torture experience it on their own. They have organized a new Impact Week that allows them to fully experience it.  

Some students have recalled their first impressions of Impact Week and how it made them feel. 

“My first impact week almost made me want to transfer,” said junior Connor Martin. "I was worried that every week would be like that. Thankfully it's only once a year, but even then it feels like too much.” 

Students had coordinated and planned for months on ways to make sure the faculty got the full Impact Week experience. From sleeping on the bus, to missing lunch, to the soreness in the legs after a long day of work, these are all feelings that coincide with Impact Week. 

After months of coordination and planning the students came up with the following plan. Before the makeshift Impact Week starts, students call and reserve time slots for the teachers at organizations that are placed at least an hour away. Once faculty arrive at school, they will have to sit through a 45-minute presentation led by the freshman class on their favorite Tik-Tok trends while being surveilled by the varsity football team to make sure no one falls asleep. Once the presentation is over, they will be driven by the junior class in small buses to their sites where they will need to sit through an hour of music chosen by each driver on the radio, on full blast. This music will not be turned down at any point during the drive. Once at the location, it will be similar to a regular impact week until their time is over in which they will drive back. However, the entire time at the site student-drivers will give ambiguous answers as to whether or not the group will be stopping to get food, when in the end, they never will. Once back at the school teachers will be forced to sit through another 30 minute presentation led by the sophomores while being forced to stay awake. This will be repeated the entirety of the week without a late start on Wednesday.

“It’s important for them to have this experience too,” said senior Kenny Groen. “This is a right of passage for all Men of  Carmel.” 

There have been varying perspectives from the teachers on this issue, however most have been negative

“This sounds like the worst thing I may ever have to go through,” said freshman theology teacher Mr. Petrich. “I don’t know how they were able to come up with the worst possible schedule.”

After a trial run, many students are pushing for this makeshift Impact week to be an annual occurrence, while many faculty are pushing for a ban on Impact week in general.