Damascus High School’s Best Buddy Club is happy to be back in person and ready to start doing activities again. This club has roughly 60 members and is run by science resource teacher, Mrs. Rebecca McGaffin. The club meets once a month on Wednesdays for members to participate in fun activities and projects with students that have intellectual disabilities. Some of the fun activities that this club has done this year include tye dying t-shirts, playing bocce, coloring pictures, singing songs and most recently playing This or That. 

   This club was first started by retired teacher Mrs. Formeller and has been a club here for over 15 years. It is a great opportunity for students to make new friends and is a good chance for the buddies to get to “make memories because they get to interact with a lot of the students so they get to enjoy a real high school experience,” says Mrs. McGaffin. High school can be really challenging and hard at times, especially for students who have intellectual disabilities, so this club has made a positive impact on the buddies as well as the students who are a part of the club. 

   Throughout the past two years, the Best Buddies Club has had to hold its meetings via Zoom instead of in person, and while it was still better than nothing, McGaffin said it has been “a lot better to have the meetings back in person again, especially for the buddies.” This is especially true since each year the buddies is assigned to a student and together the buddy and student get to become friends and get to do fun activities together whether it’s creating art projects, playing sports or just simply talking. However, due to the pandemic and in order to stay safe, the members of the club couldn’t interact with each other in person but that made being able to see everyone in person this year all the more special.

   The president of the Best Buddies Club, Camryn Manoogian, has “been a part of Best Buddies since my freshman year, for the past four years. Even before I was in high school I would attend some of the Best Buddies events held outside of school because my older sister was also president a few years ago.” She said that one of her favorite things about being a part of the Best Buddies Club for all four years is “meeting all of the students and watching their relationships with one another grow! It is so amazing to see people who just met at the start of the school year become best friends only a few months into school!”