As Lake Ridge High School grows in population, more and more students arrive each year. A school of this size can be hard to navigate when you’re a new student. For some students this can be overwhelming. However, the Ambassadors Club is there to help ease new students into the school year.

From giving every new student a tour of Lake Ridge to just saying a welcoming “Hi’’ on Welcome Wednesdays, the student ambassadors club do it all. Leandra Lester, sponsor and lead counselor, believes that ambassadors club is a major necessity to keep Lake Ridge a positive place for every student. “This club is vital to creating a welcoming and inclusive community at Lake Ridge,” Lester said, “I saw the need, especially with the amount of growth our campus has experienced. We don’t want anyone to feel lost or to slip through the cracks.”

Ambassadors don’t only give tours to the new students. They also reach out to students experiencing different hardships in their home and school lives. President Jada Brown explains how the ambassadors help students through tough times. “We help the student society get through every day things. We help people who have had problems outside of school and give them extra support, or even in a general way, we did a take what you need wall with sticky notes with just encouraging messages on them,” Brown said.

It’s important for Lake Ridge to have ambassadors who care about the student body and are there to help with any problems. The main goal of this club is to create one student body, according to Senior Taylor Nelson. Nelson believes that its important to have a group of students who are always available to help. “There needs to be friendly faces around to help the underclassmen that are confused or help the new students not feel so out of place. We really just want to unify our school and do everything in our power to just get students to be one unified student body,” Nelson said,” The reward of seeing all the new students get settled into the school and start to make new friends is why we do all this, it means that we are doing our job correctly.”

For some new students, the ambassadors club is the reason they feel so comfortable here. The club gave them a helping hand in their transition to a new school. Junior Taelyn Echols says that the ambassadors were helpful in getting her acquainted to Lake Ridge her freshman year. “Coming here was overwhelming ,especially in the middle of the year, just because it was so different from my old school in California, but the student ambassadors really made my transition here much easier on me,” Echols said, “They helped me get used to Lake Ridge by showing me around and telling me about all the different classes and told me about all the programs the school has to offer, like Ben Barber which was completely foreign to me. It felt nice knowing that there were people here who cares.”