National Honor Society is a national scholastic organization for exceptional high school students. Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School has had a chapter of NHS for 20 years, and the club was led by AP United States History teacher Lisa Hitchcock for 15 of those 20 years. However, Hitchcock retired last year, placing the club in the hands of AP Human Geography teacher Lauren Saccomonno.

Saccomonno was chosen by Hitchcock at the end of the 2023-2024 school year to take over her role as NHS advisor, and after a few weeks of thinking over it, Saccomonno agreed.

“Mrs. Hitchcock approached me because she knew I mostly taught ninth grade AP students last year, and she knew they would be a large part of the students rising into NHS,” Saccomonno said. “All club positions that open up get presented to the school, but we talked to Mrs. Kefford, and then I was chosen as the best candidate.”

The members and officers are adjusting well to Saccomonno, including NHS co-president Kody Brereton.

“Mrs. Saccomonno has been an amazing advisor,” Brereton said. “Despite having large shoes to fill, none of our officer team has anything to complain about. She’s really been able to bring us all together to do amazing things for our community.”

Saccomonno met many of the new members of NHS at their induction ceremony last year. She also met many of the officers before the new school year started.

“The biggest difference for me personally is that I had Mrs. Hitchcock as a teacher last year, so I already got to know her more personally, where I didn’t get to meet Mrs. Saccomonno until the end of the year,” NHS co-president Lindsay Rogalla said. “However, we got to introduce ourselves at the induction ceremony last school year and have been able to develop more of a relationship since then.”

This year, NHS plans to work with more clubs at MSD to reach shared goals and keep club participation up. So far this year they have already made many changes, including increasing the grade point average requirements. The minimum GPA needed to be accepted into the club was increased from 3.0 to 3.2. This allowed MSD’s NHS to maintain academic rigor and compete with other schools in the area that have higher standards, such as Cypress Bay High School, which requires a 3.5.

“We had our members vote on this policy at our first meeting with a majority pass it,” Rogalla said.

NHS’ goal going forward is to stress the importance of making the club a community in which every member belongs.

Saccomonno also wants to keep up with the standard that Hitchcock had been working hard to set for the past 15 years.

“We do technically see competition with the other NHS programs,” Saccomonno said. “We’ve always been one of the top so I just wanna kind of uphold the standard that we’ve been setting for the past couple of years.”

NHS’ next event is the Harvest Drive, which will help people in the community who cannot afford food for Thanksgiving. Saccomonno hopes that they are able to maintain the outstanding reputation they have built for themselves over the past few years under Hitchcock’s guidance.