Like many schools, every few months MTHS has a week dedicated to showing school spirit. Spirit weeks are a great way to have students show school spirit, whether it’s to hype kids up for homecoming or get everyone ready for the next spirit assembly. For a while now, I have wondered who plans spirit weeks and if students have any impact on the decisions.
Overall, spirit weeks take about three weeks to a month to plan. The theme for each day is decided by the Big Six, with help from class ASB.
But when it comes to planning spirit weeks, there seems to be a lack of student input. With more student feedback and opinions, school spirit would increase.
Sophomore Sofiya Pisarets believes that with more student feedback, “students would be more excited [to participate] in spirit weeks, because they [would get] to choose what they like.”
If the students got to share our ideas for spirit weeks, it would be a great way to bring our little community together, help people be more active in our school, and even increase participation.
However, according to former Big Six President Andy Shaw, ASB has tried to get more student input when planning spirit weeks.
“In past years,” Shaw said, “we tried to get more student feedback, may that be asking students at lunch, having them fill out forms, doing Google forms online, sending them through emails. All that feedback, we tried to compile them up last year and it didn’t seem like spirit weeks were increasing in participation.”
So, despite numerous opportunities for students to suggest ideas for spirit weeks, school spirit hasn’t increased.
Even though this may be the case, student opinions are very valued by ASB, according to Big Six Historian Skylar Knight.
“Student feedback is really important because [ASB] needs to know what to improve in order to make the school more accessible to people,” Knight said.
Knight believes that being inclusive is one of the main goals of ASB.
“I think that the biggest goal is to be like, ‘ok, we have all these kids at school and we have to plan events for them, what do we need to do to make these events for them?’ Opinions from students are a tool we can use to help us with that,” Knight said.
But not all feedback is necessarily good. In fact, it can be hard to find the right feedback needed for a particular event.
“The problem with student feedback is sometimes the process can get a little convoluted and a little messy”, Knight said, “Some feedback is helpful and some feedback is uninformed [because] some people don’t know how the process actually works, so it’s hard to condense the student feedback into something that is actually helpful and to gather that information, so the best thing we can do is try and look for as much as we can and then use that information to help us.”
So even though finding the right student feedback can be a bit complicated for ASB, they try their best to get the most out of feedback, and use those opinions they can help out in a big way.
Student opinions serve a huge role in our school, whether it’s to plan spirit weeks or any other event. The feedback may not increase school spirit, but in some ways, it would get people more involved in our school.
We are a community, and everyone should be able to get the chance to contribute to something to help our school become a better place.
School spirit doesn’t really need to be expressed by the amount of people that dress up for spirit weeks or who shows the most excitement during assemblies. It’s expressed by participation in clubs, wanting to improve our school, even if it’s just doing something as small as filling out forms to help brainstorm spirit weeks.
