When the Executive ASB was thinking about creating a spirit week for Valentine’s Day, we wanted to try something new. We wanted a theme that was different from “The Week of Love,” which is a theme that we have had many of the previous years. We wanted a unique assembly that didn’t involve the classic “something’s stolen” theme or have the usual class vs. class games. We wanted something fresh. What we came up with was “The Battle of the Sexes” where the whole week would be a competition between boys and girls.

Kim Stewart, our advisor, informed us about what had happened at other schools that have done a “Battle of the Sexes” week. He told us in the past, the boys and girls got too competitive and things got out of hand. Keeping this in mind, we made a proposal for “Battle of the Sexes” week. Our objective for this week was to create a fun, healthy competition between the boys and girls at our school to increase our school’s spirit.

While planning out the spirit week, we were very mindful that things could go wrong. We wanted to make our objective very clear by setting the tone with our games and spirit days. After creating our proposal we scheduled an appointment with Principal Greg Schwab to get it approved. With a few concerns, he asked us to make some minor changes and we acted accordingly.

The following week we made a poster, as we’ve done for every spirit week, to inform the student body of our theme and spirit days for the coming week. A couple days later we received several unexpected complaints regarding the spirit week. These letters, emails and tweets accused ASB of creating a spirit week that was “extremely unnecessary” and didn’t “make this school feel like a safe, comfortable place for students of all genders or sexes.” They informed us that there are many students who “do not identify with a gender, or identify with a third gender.” We took this issue very seriously and followed standard procedure.

During our ASB meeting on Feb. 6, we gave everyone the opportunity to state his or her concern. Later that day, the executive ASB had a meeting to discuss this issue. Our final decision was to change the theme of the week to “The Power of Love.” We also changed Tuesday’s spirit day to “Royalty Day” from its original “Prince and Princess Day.” We also changed Friday’s spirit day from “Blue vs. Pink” to “Valentine’s Day Colors.”

ASB’s job is to serve others, to be servants to the student body. We are constantly losing sleep and staying after hours to improve our school and make everyone feel like they belong.  We don’t do it for the awards or recognition, we do it because we genuinely care about each and every person that walks through the halls of our school.

Like Principal Greg Schwab said at our Friday meeting, “Our school has worked very hard and done a great job of creating an inclusive atmosphere. We can’t be inclusive 90 percent of the time or even 99 percent of the time, we have to be inclusive 100 percent of the time.”

We didn’t make changes to the spirit week because we were worried about losing people’s support, and we didn’t change it because people were “disappointed with our judgment.”

We changed the spirit week because we believe everyone deserves to be accepted, respected, and most importantly, loved.

We are looking forward to this new spirit week as we believe it will bring everyone together and display “The Power of Love.”

NOTE: Hawkeye provides the Associated Student Body space each issue in the Op/Ed section as part of our mission as a designated open public forum.