After a lot of pushback and meetings with the school’s administration because there was already a similar club, Hispanic Leadership Club, LSU was established three years ago. LSU’s founder and president, senior Teddy Garcia, started the club to support the Olathe West Hispanic community with their post-secondary plans. 

“Latinx Student Union is basically just a system of support for students that want to go to college or maybe are thinking about going to college or some secondary education and they don’t really know how to get there or how that’s achievable,” Garcia said. “LSU helps kids get scholarships [in] various different ways. We give scholarships from our club to seniors. We take trips to colleges, we go and show kids how the college life is.”

There are various scholarships available to Hispanic students through companies and organizations, and LSU helps inform students about those opportunities.

“Our main fundraiser that we focus on is called ‘Cambio Por Cambio’,” Garcia said. “We work with a company called Hispanic Development Fund. They work with us all the month of Hispanic Heritage Month. Basically, what they do is they give us one month to raise as much money as we can, and at the end of that month, they double it to match our money.”

Last year, LSU was able to distribute around $8,000 to Hispanic senior students at Olathe West. Students can put this scholarship money towards their post-secondary plans, whether their next chapter is college, a trade school or the workforce. To reach their goal of $10,000, the club knows what will attract the most customers. 

“Our club’s specialty is food,” Garcia said. “We have a lot of good people that know how to cook, we have a lot of good connections, we have a lot of good things to make food. So our club focuses on food. This year, our menu consists of popsicles from local, small businesses like Quesabrosa or Tropicana, and then we also have elotes that I make every Wednesday and Thursday.”

Garcia is just one of the seven students on the executive board that is helping lead LSU. 

“My position in LSU is the social media chair,” senior Roxy Yanez said. “What I do is I post all, like, social media things that are up, like on the Instagram, the TikTok, whenever we have events, I’m always posting on there. I’m very active.”

Utilizing social media is important to advertise events and fundraisers like LSU’s. Their first meeting of the year on Sept. 11 welcomed over 50 students. 

“So, how I plan to help our club is to just try and get as many people to join our club, be involved, and also just raise as much money as possible, get people to buy our items,” Yanez said. “We’ve been really successful for the first two days of our lunch sales, so yeah, I’m really excited for the rest of the year.”

This is only the start of the club’s efforts to help the Hispanic community at Olathe West. The focus is to support Hispanic students and ensure a strong legacy for years to come.

“I think the goal this year is to just have a support system for the underclassmen to get to be able to keep this club going and help as much people go to college,” Garcia said. “We want to help those kids understand what college is, understand if that’s the right path for them and how to achieve that dream. Because sometimes, for a lot of Hispanics, college is an unattainable dream, and we want to make that dream attainable.”