By: Alana Penn
Spirit week is an event meant to bring students of all classes together for fun activities. Posters detailing the themes for each day of the week were hung up everywhere around campus, encouraging students to get involved in the festivities. On every social media site you turn to, your peers post pictures of spirit week flyers, passive-aggressively reminding you to dress up and help your class win spirit points. So why, save for maybe most of the upperclassmen, do some students opt out of dressing up for spirit week?
One answer to this question is glaringly obvious: some students just don’t find spirit week festivities interesting enough to even bother with participating. This is likely because some of the day-to-day themes are not engaging to some. Of course, the goal of spirit week is to create themes that challenge students to come up with unique or entertaining outfits and have fun while doing so.
I understand this isn’t meant to be easy; there’s no fun in that of course. There would be no competition between classes if students could just throw on any outfit for a theme and call it a day. But there’s a fine line between making themes to challenge students and making themes that are plain boring. Take this year’s diversity week for example. One day was dubbed “Favorite Holiday Day,” yet if someone’s favorite holiday were to be Halloween for example, they were not allowed to show up to school in costume. Instead, students were encouraged to show up in clothing bearing Halloween images. I understand the safety concerns that can come with this theme, such as wearing costumes with masks, but this takes the fun out of dressing up. Rules like this can contribute to a lack of spirit week participation.
This is not to discredit any of the work put into these events by MHS’s Associated Student Body (ASB) crew. It’s just that there is always room for improvement, and spirit week in general is no exception to this. You’re probably wondering how to boost spirit week participation in the first place. How would one even go about doing this?
The answer lies in involvement. Getting more people in the student body involved with spirit week plans could potentially help remedy this issue. For example, ASB can try to send out Google Forms to students regarding spirit week themes and gauge the opinion of the student body when making the schedule. This way, it would be much easier to figure out which themes are more popular with students beforehand. This in turn would make spirit week a more inclusive and fun experience for everyone. While there are still steps that could be taken towards solving this issue, this is definitely a solution to consider.