In conjunction with the Federal Election which took place last week, students were given the opportunity to have their political voices heard in our Student Election facilitated by Student Vote Canada.

At Alpha we had 4 polling stations for classes to use to vote. The stations were run by volunteers from our own Student Government. Voting took place all day on Friday April 25th with students selecting from the four candidates in the Burnaby North- Seymour Electoral District.

The Candidates:

• Terry Beech (Liberal)
• Michael Charrois (NDP)
• Mauro Francis (Conservative)
• Jesse Fulton (PPC)

In total 644 of our students cast their vote, which is almost 50% of our student population. The breakdown locally was as follows:

• 319 Liberal
• 131 NDP
• 150 Conservative
• 28 PPC
• 16 Rejected

While the clear winner at Alpha was Terry Beech of the Liberal Party, Federally, the student vote went Conservative. Further information about the results can be found on the Student Vote website here.

Alpha Secondary School held its first Human Library event, in over 10 years, on April 24th. The Human Library is a project created by the Danish youth organization Stop the Violence, in 2000. It is now operational in more than 60 countries. It’s purpose its to ​challenge societal prejudices and to help people form a better understanding of those who are different from them through conversation.

How it works is that members of the community with interesting life stories and intersectional identities volunteer to act as ‘books’. Our grade 11 and 12 students were then given the opportunity to sit down with the books and  ask them questions about their lives and identities. The group of books was varied in terms of age, race and sexual orientations. We had 14 books volunteer in total, with their identities ranging from an Indigenous Olympian, to a Queer Urban Planner to a retired Funeral Home Director who was also a Steampunk Professor.

In total 15 classes attend the all-day event, meaning over 300 students participated. Feedback from students was very positive, with most wishing they had more time so that they could have chatted with more of the books. One student even wrote,

“It was interesting to hear the perspectives and life experiences of people coming from unique environments. Their outlook showed me that everyone has their own book…humanity is a library and to discriminate would be simply missing out on some good stories.”

We thank all the students who participated and the teachers who signed their classes up for the event. We were pleased to see such a wonderful community building event take place in the library again, after such a long hiatus.

The 2025 Book Club is on now. Here is the schedule for January’s discussions

Are you an artist? Do you like books? Want to design a bookmark for the library? The library bookmark contest is on now! Entries are due December 18th. See Ms. Haigh in the library for more details.