French Honor Society, now under new student leadership, hopes to have a bigger presence this school year.

FHS created four smaller sub-committees: event planning, public outreach, fundraising and special events. Each committee is led by the four officers: juniors Noni Shemenski, Astrid Favre, Devin Nieusma, and Claire Nieusma.

Club supervisor and French teacher Laura Bachman notices a change in the structure and student involvement.

“Participation has been good,” Bachman said. “I am very proud of the involvement this year. Also, we are planning regular monthly meetings on the last Monday of the month, which has helped keep the club organized.”

The honor society’s first event of the year will be a crepe party after school in the Lecture Hall on

Monday, Nov. 18. This event is exclusive for French students.

The overall initiative of the revamped club is to promote international awareness, which includes presentations on other countries and fundraising for other countries.

“Most of the focus is making a ‘citoyen mondial,’ or a global citizen,” Shemenski said.

For FHS, part of promoting global citizenship includes promoting awareness of francophone or French speaking countries besides France.

To achieve this, the committees rotate the responsibility of sharing information about a francophone, country in the “Presentation de Pays” at each meeting. These areas include parts of Africa and Europe as well as Haiti and provinces in Canada.

“The purpose of the country presentations is to gain more knowledge about the fact that France isn’t the only French-speaking country,” Favre said. “There are a lot of areas in the world that speak French.”

The club’s main fundraising efforts will help French-speaking countries around the world, particularly Haiti, where the effects of the 2010 earthquake are still felt.

“The impacts of the earthquake have devastated the country,” Shemenski said. “There are a lot of vestiges of impact that it made.”

Last year, FHS collected school supplies in a drive. Later this year, FHS will have multiple crepe bake sales in order to raise sufficient funds to send the materials to Haiti.

“We’re actually really focused on Haiti,” Shemenski said. “We’re really thinking about people overseas who need our help, and we’re not going to let them down. We’re going to follow through and get this to them because they truly do need it.”

The club is working to secure a Haitian school to which it will send the donated supplies. FHS aspires to develop a pen-pal relationship between Haitian students and South Lakes students to better encourage global solidarity.

“I am proud of the students because they are motivated to help students in another country,” Bachman said. “We have a mission this year and I think that has helped students become more involved.”