At 9 a.m. on Saturday, September 24, students from all four grade levels armed with paintbrushes and duct tape, reported to their assigned hallways for the annual decorate the hallway for homecoming. This annual contest has taken place every year the Saturday before homecoming and it can get pretty intense. Students worked from 9a.m. to around 3 p.m. this year and as one student put it, every second counts.
The homecoming game was played against the Home School Blue Angels so this years’ theme was Air Force Angels. While decorating the hallways is fun, there was a bit of controversy from the senior class’ hallway.
The senior class kept to the plane theme by featuring a plane crash, complete with screaming people and bloody handprints. But with the tenth anniversary of 9/11 recently passing, some people were shocked by what they found.
While some students saw the plane crash representing a terrorist attack, that was not the intent of the seniors who decorated the hallway.
“We hadn’t even thought about it that way at all and were only trying to come up with a fun idea for homecoming week that had to with planes,” a senior who decorated the hallway said. “No harm was intended.”
The poster of the plane was later taken down from the hallway on Monday morning before many students or staff got to see the poster. There was no controversy elsewhere as the other classes took a different approach to the homecoming theme.
The freshmen deviated from the theme by covering the hallway completely with black paper. They made white bubbles and signs and posted every freshman’s name on them and wrote spirited slogans all over the hallway in different colored paints and chalk.
The defending champion, the 2014 class stuck with the Air Force theme and put up fighter planes throughout the hallway. Clouds were hung on the ceiling of the hallway, complete with little planes hanging among them. They were trying to create a plane race from one end of the hall to the other with lights marking the landing zone at the end of the hall and a leopard directing traffic.
The juniors went away from the theme a little as well. Their hallway featured a jungle setting and had a crash theme. They also took every junior class member’s name and wrote them on black dots and bananas and put them all over the walls.
While most students thought the hallway decorations were okay, there was another concern. This one regarding a poster put up showing examples of the various spirit days. Trying to illustrate “Black Out” day in a fun fashion, the poster featured two African-American students wearing all black. However, administration took the poster down in the best interest of the students.
“Students don’t always know that people who come into our school that aren’t a part of the school may look at the message in a wrong way, even students that are in the school, like African Americans students might look at that as not funny,” principal Gavan Goodrich said. “Sometimes we have to make decisions for the whole school even though the intent was to be humorous and funny.”
Although the decision was made to take the poster down, administrators believe student council was trying to be funny.
“The intent of the poster was to be funny and kind of ironic that two African Americans were on a Black Out poster. It was their idea and they thought it would be funny and humorous,” Goodrich said. “There was no intent to hurt anybody’s feelings.”
