The dance is over, homecoming season 2023 has come to an end, and many are grateful to forget this controversial theme and move on.
This year, leadership picked mobile apps to represent each spirit day and class theme. Some of the spirit days included: Garage Band Tuesday where students wore band t-shirts, Weather App Wednesday where students dressed up in winter clothing like snow gear, and BeReal Monday where students wore pajamas.
Each grade was also assigned a popular mobile game to dress up as on Friday — Hay Day for seniors, Temple Run for juniors, Subway Surf for sophomores, and Mario Kart for freshmen.
Although this may sound like fun to some, the social media theme has not been a widely celebrated choice. With so many students being unsupportive of the theme, it’s a question how it was chosen in the first place.
“We decided the homecoming theme through a poll,” said senior Rian Stefani, who is involved in leadership. “We had a bunch of options and we got to [vote for] which one we wanted.”
This poll is exclusive only to leadership, even though those students do not make up a large portion of the student body. A better option would be for leadership to put out a survey with multiple themes to pick from, and so the entire school can vote. Everyone in the school is affected by the theme, so it would be more fair to give them the opportunity to provide input. Additionally, even though the majority of leadership voted in favor of apps, some of the students wanted a different theme. Another option that was suggested in the poll included dressing up as different areas of California, like Beverly Hills and Hollywood.
“I voted for anything but [apps],” Stefani said. “I thought we could be more clever and unique.”
Stefani is not the only one who disagrees with the theme. One of Monte Vista’s Instagram accounts made a post revealing the theme for each spirit day, and it was met with plenty of negative feedback from students in the comment section. Some students prefer the theme of last year’s homecoming instead.
“Last year was Met Gala, which I thought was really cool,” Stefani said. “It fits dresses for the dances, and [this year] I don’t want to dress up as a Snapchat logo.”
Compared to mobile apps, the Met Gala theme allowed for more creativity in spirit days and class themes. It was also relevant to the then-current pop culture.
Prior to last year, the homecoming spirit days in 2021 were based around different songs — wearing pajamas on one day to match “The Lazy Song” and neon athletic gear for “Let’s Get Physical” on another day. In 2020, the dance was not held due to COVID-19.
Personally, I believe the homecoming theme could have been more original, or at least something more exciting than just social media. I would be more interested in seeing a theme related to the recent releases in the music industry from this past year, such as: songs from the new Barbie movie’s soundtrack, Olivia Rodrigo’s latest album GUTS, and Tyler, The Creator’s album Call Me If You Get Lost: The Estate Sale.
For now, we can only wait and see what next year’s homecoming will bring, and hope it will be an improvement from this year’s.
