by Lauryn Hughes | staff writer
The first week of school brought a surprise – a campus wide pep rally on the football field, the first like it in years. According to vice principal Stuart Guthrie, an in-school pep rally allows students to engage in school spirit. It was an idea highly discussed before the administrators were able to come to a decision.
“There’s a lot that encompasses the school experience. Obviously we’re here to teach students and we do a very good job of that, but we also feel like school spirit, being together with your peers, and acknowledging accomplishments of your peers has value,” Guthrie said. “It wasn’t a decision that we all as administrators came to easily; we talked about it, we debated it, and it felt like something we could at least try, and see how it [goes].”
Because of the school’s large population, safety is a concern any time staff and students are together in one place. Since the pep rally was during the final period of school, there were also concerns about time for students who had to be picked up or take the bus home.
“There’s a big part of it that is safety. We want to keep everybody together. I followed the last twenty percent of the students through the hallway, then on the way back I did the same,” Guthrie said. “We used the time it took to get through the hallway in as a measure for how much time we had to allow the students to get to their busses, their pickup, and to their cars. We knew it was going to be a tight fit and the kids did a fantastic job because everybody walked right through. There were really no issues or any incidents.”
Although the rally went according to plan, the likelihood of another one happening during school is unlikely.
“We want to keep our kids in class, and [doing] this every week or every other week would be a pretty good chunk of time that kids would miss in class. We did it to kinda jump start the school year, celebrate all together. In the future we’ll probably have them in the evenings like we normally do or before school starts in the morning,” Guthrie said.
