The CVHS LGBTQ+ club, Spectrum, is now revitalized and back in action! After a long awaited semester, the club has reincarnated back into life with new leaders, club name, and activities! Spectrum offers a broad array of activities, such as LGBTQ+ art dissections and video chatting the LGBTQ+ role models, planned by the new leaders Nora Mohamed and Perrin Calzada, who partnered up with the long time sponsor, James Parker in room , to get the club back up in running!

“We started out the club as a diversity club, at the time back then there were issues in the district with bullying and anti-lgbt, over the years became more of a social mean and discuss political topics on LGBT, and socializing with literacture and art,” Parker said.

Spectrum had originally started when the new campus was built when Mr. Parker came to teach at CVHS, it was originally named GSA, standing for Gender & Sexuality Allegiance before recently changing it to PRISM followed by the most recent change to the name, Spectrum.

“We changed the original name to what it is now due to students thinking it stood for something, which it did not and after asking for teachers input on the name they said it sounded like prison. It also marked a new start for the club,” said Calzada. 

Annie Nyugen and Lilian Spiller, the former leaders of Spectrum, creating all the events as well as hosting them and keeping contact with members. However, due to this, the club died down once everyone became busy and had to focus more on their studies.

“I think the reason was that the previous presidents were busy and couldn’t take as much time for the club as they had expected,” Calzada stated, “It wasn’t their fault, they were just busy with school work and other things going on which caused an irregular time schedule to be put in place so no one knew when to meet.”

Although the fall of PRISM was upsetting to many of the club members, some such as Nora and Perrin were upset due to their love for the concept of the club that never got a proper start. Nora and Perrin decided that it was time to start and get the club back up and running to help their fellow LGBTQ+ members and allies.

“When I was in middle school I had to form my own community since there wasn’t a club for the LGBTQ+ community or club that was really open in that area. Here there were a lot of like minded people and I saw that there was an LGBTQ+ club here and that gave me a lot of joy since my community I came from before was, like I said, not LGBTQ+ friendly,” Calzada stated. 

After both leaders knew for certain that they enjoyed the club and wanted to truly get it up and running, they got to work for planning activities and fixing problems such as infrequent meetings, and little activities.

“We have a few new things planned, still keeping Ally week and coming out day from previous years. We decided to change the schedule from infrequent meetings, into meetings every Friday. We also plan on collaborating in other districts with Houston like HATCH and plan events with them and other clubs like Spectrum. Nora is talking to the people from Stone Wall now for possibly chatting and face timing as an activity. We also plan to observe and disecty queer art and film for the fun of it!” Perrin said.

With the new come back from Spectrum a lot is to be awaited from the revived club! Their meetings are to be every Friday with new activities, events, and many more things planned ahead for LGBTQ+ members to get the safe space they deserve!