As the last school bell rings, groups of students walk out of their classrooms ready to go home. Approximately once a week, any student craving a cold drink at this time can walk to the rally court and buy a cup of boba from a table for $4.

In order for clubs to receive the money they need to participate in activities, methods such as selling boba in the rally court provide funds. Because milk tea is so popular and accessible, most clubs choose this as their method of fundraising.

Keeping this in mind, Chinese Club president and senior Jessica Lee decided to do this to provide the club with more resources.

“Usually we use [the proceeds] for club activities or Culture Night, but we [also] do food,” Lee said. “One of our big ones is the semester boba party where [we invite] people who have been regularly attending — cause we keep track of attendance — we host a boba party for everyone.”

Lee discussed the idea with her fellow officers, namely vice president and senior Vincent Tran. They decided to sell boba from YumTea for $4 a cup at school and then continue the fundraiser as a long term project.

“So the first day of the fundraiser is going to be on campus, so we’re gonna have them bring all the boba here,” Tran said. “Right after the after-school fundraiser ends, around 4:30, the fundraiser will continue at the store itself and that should be going on for about a month.”

Lee and Tran’s goal was to have this fundraiser happen within the first semester, so they decided to submit a motion in order to secure a spot within the list of fundraisers. In order to do this, club officers have to check a club calendar because there’s only two fundraisers that can happen in a week. Lee and Tran sent the email as early as they could—late September—and waited for a response.

Unfortunately, the logistics didn’t go as smoothly as they imagined.

“[The fundraiser] was supposed to be running from the beginning of October to the end of October,” Tran said. “We’ve sent emails to them, we submitted two motions to make sure in case they didn’t get the first one or second one, and they still haven’t responded to us. It’s been about four weeks now.”

However, this may have simply been due to a misunderstanding. According to ASB president and senior Derek Zheng, Leadership decided to implement a new policy proposal at the start of the school year.

“[Now], instead of sending out an email for a fundraiser, you would put it into a Google form,” Zheng said. “The Google form is sent out in the email that I send to all the clubs, and so clubs would go on there and fill out everything. The night before leadership council, around the deadline, which is usually Tuesday at 7 p.m. now, Student Life [and Leadership] goes and checks it.”

The new form replaces the process of sending in motions, making planning for fundraisers more efficient for Leadership and clubs. Zheng recalled a few clubs still sending in motions and believes that they may have missed the mass email he sent at the beginning of the school year.

Although it took getting used to, the new system is working for Leadership. Zheng acknowledges that the methods of informing the clubs were not completely clear and that Chinese Club was not the only club that had been met with confusion. To avoid situations like this in future years, Zheng is creating a rule handbook for reference.

“I’m personally compiling a leadership handbook with all of the rules so I can send out to clubs,” Zheng said. “There seems to be a lot of confusion this year with a ton of new clubs and a lot of old club presidents not handing off the club correctly in terms of telling each other the rules and the guidelines.”