School spirit is always something special for each school, allowing students to show patriotism and pride with their classmates. Spirits include a wide variety of fun and unique themes such as Maryland day, tie-dye day, 70’s day and, my favorite, cybergoth day, just to name a few. WJ had its first 2017-2018 pep rally and spirit week just a few weeks ago. It was a blast, especially for us seniors, although some improvements could be made.

Senior William Moulec was an active participant in spirit week.

“It’s really fun. It gets the student body connected. Still, we could definitely get more students to participate,” Moulec said.

He speaks the truth. Spirit week is fun, sure, but I think we can all agree we could always get more people to take part in this fun-filled week. We could also change the spirits each year so that the outfits aren’t too much of a hassle to prepare but are still exciting for students. The WJ student leadership is responsible for organizing and deciding the themes for spirit week, so maybe the WJ student body could pitch in some suggestions to help them decide.

History and Law teacher, Allison Hoefling, gave some insight as to how.

“Spirit week is great but I think including some sort of voting poll on The Pitch website could probably get more favorable spirits,” Hoefling said.

This isn’t a bad idea, in terms of picking interesting spirits that the students want. Students and readers could also add anonymous suggestions for what spirits to do and let everyone vote on those as well, making a voting database of collective opinions.

That was just one suggestion out of many, of course. In terms of getting more participation, that’s where it gets challenging. We could try increasing the occurrences of spirit week throughout the year and see how that turns out, or maybe just do something along the lines of a costume contest with prizes like we did this year.

Whichever road the leadership team chooses to take, I have faith they’ll carry it out effectively.