by Daisy Creager|Staff Writer
Known for planning fun events and contests to bring together the student body, it is not very often that a Student Council event does not go as planned. Between their promotion of healthy foods and anti-bullying campaign, the club has been an active part of the community during the 2013-2014 school year. So why was the StuCo planned freshman and sophomore ‘Boots and Bling’ dance such a flop?
“I think it kind of made us feel bad,” freshman Brianna Hawkins said. “I think it was a bad idea because prom just happened, and it seemed childish and immature.”
According to StuCo sponsor Jennifer Jones, however, that was not the clubs’ intention at all.
“We planned it to give the freshmen and sophomores something fun since they didn’t have prom to look forward to,” Jones said.
The club began planning for the dance as early as the beginning of last school year.
“We started talking about having it the first couple of meetings when we were planning Homecoming and talking about fun, casual themes,” Jones said. “That’s when the idea came up. Jag Jam hasn’t been done for the last two years because not very many people went and it wasn’t very profitable.”
Not only would the event bring together the underclassman, but it would be a source of revenue for the club in place of Jag Jam. Despite all of their planning, only a meager 11 tickets were sold and the dance was cancelled. According to sophomore and StuCo member Hailey Koebrick, state testing may have interfered with ticket sales.
“I think it was poor planning on our part to plan for ticket sales to start mid-week and only go for three days right after testing,” Koebrick said. “Everyone was so consumed with preparing for their tests, and they weren’t really paying attention to a lot of the other things that were going on on campus. That was definitely a key reason that we didn’t get the ticket sales that we wanted.
However, a lack of credibility for the dance also contributed toward it’s lack of success.
“We’re freshmen and sophomores, a dance without the upperclassmen makes us feel undergraded,” Hawkins said. “Inviting juniors and senior would make it seem more interesting for us.”
For future events, StuCo will use the support of upperclassmen and word of mouth to generate the interest of the student body.
“I think that without the support of the upperclassmen saying ‘Hey, this is cool, we’re gonna go to it’ I think it’s hard for underclassmen to know when something’s going to be cool,” Jones said. “Hopefully they’ll remember ‘StuCo puts on the fun dances’ and they’ll realize that when StuCo puts on something they need to go because it’s going to be fantastic. Hopefully word of mouth will help a lot.”
Now out money and with more decorations than they know what to do with, StuCo is still deciding what to do to recover.
“No one wants to lose money, but luckily we didn’t lose a ton of it,” Jones said. “We used the money we were going to pay the DJ toward next year’s homecoming. Most of the decorations we made so luckily we didn’t lose a whole lot of money.”
The decorations included hay bales that StuCo has stored at the school that now have to be donated or sold to someone. In addition, the club still has to decide what to do with the shirts left over from the dance.
“I have no idea what we’re going to do with them,” Jones said. “Hopefully talk to Mr. Mehlbrech and see if we can have something some other time before the end of 2014 since they say 2014 on them.”
Despite their trouble with the dance, the StuCo students have learned from the experience.
“I think that we kind of just need to plan better in the future,” Koebrick said. “We need to look at what else is going on around campus as far as testing and other events and we definitely need to try to think of more out of the box ideas that the student body will respond to well.”
