In case enough people haven’t complained about it enough already, students were required to attend the back-to-school rally for the first time in recent memory. In previous years, students were encouraged to attend but were offered alternate locations either for mental health reasons or lack of enthusiasm. According to many people, this system worked for as long as it was put into place. But everything changed when school spirit attacked.
Without access to the inner workings of the school’s bureaucratic process, this reporter’s idea is of an ominous committee à la Babylon 5’s Grey Council deciding on the fate of the student body. Regardless, the picture is of a circle of hooded figures deciding what problems at Monte Vista need addressing and focusing on a lack of “school spirit,” as the most pressing on campus.
While the decline in enthusiasm among the student body is an issue (more on that below), the way the administration has chosen to handle it hasn’t been very well received by its targets. Making the rallies mandatory doesn’t encourage any sort of fun; it just forces the people who don’t enjoy them to interact with the people who do, bringing down both people’s spirits.
“Forcing people to go to the rallies to ‘boost school spirit’ is a horrible idea,” said junior Hashim Basheer. “Many people are uninterested and would much rather do other things than watch rallies with stuff they’ve already seen.”
Many students at the school almost exclusively used the alternate classrooms, and being forced to go the rally actively made a lot of people enjoy it less, since this time it wasn’t their choice to sit in the hot sun for an hour and listen to poorly mixed music at max volume (someone needs to go to the speakers and switch the audio level and the gain level. The music was too grainy and too loud to be understood at all.) However, a significant number of students do enjoy attending the rallies, and the school shouldn’t completely get rid of them just for the sake of the part of the population that dislikes them. There are definitely fun parts to the rally; the students participating in and hosting the rally had an impressive amount of enthusiasm and were easily the best aspect of the experience. The only issue with the rallies arises when they are forced upon the students rather than encouraged.
“I think rallies are liked because they’re a time to promote school spirit…and focus on the fun parts of high school,” said junior and Leadership student Nick Rashidi. “One thing Leadership is working on this year is making sure that more people get represented in rallies…cheerleaders, band, and more, all to get to show their special talents, and the people who want to be in the stands do that as well.”
As mentioned before, the decline in school spirit isn’t a made-up problem. There is much more friction between students than the school would like to believe, but it isn’t simple enough to be fixed by packing people together and force-feeding them cheers and chants about how amazing Monte Vista is. Rallies can’t fix the homophobia, sexism, racism, and further intolerance that lie barely under the surface of the student body. Discrimination and biases don’t spawn out of hate for Monte Vista’s physical campus; rather, for the unsuspecting people that inhabit it. Students don’t need to learn to love Monte Vista; they need to learn to love each other. Does the school board want to increase school spirit? Encourage education of different cultures in electives or social studies classes, or involvement in equity groups, or just helping people to understand that, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or religion, everyone here is a Monte Vista student.
