I don’t know about you, but when I picture Spirit Week, I imagine high schoolers wearing luau necklaces or head-to-toe red, white, and blue. In most high schools around the country, Spirit Week is just that: spirited. In Mountain Lakes, however, Spirit Week is quite the opposite. The harsh truth is that, aside from a few enthusiastic teachers, Spirit Week at MLHS is largely a dud. It seems that our school is an anomaly.
Why the lack of spirit?
We investigated by asking students in multiple grade levels what they think the culprit for our spiritless Spirit Week is. One common answer to our question was the fear of standing out. One MLHS junior hypothesized that the reason MLHS spirit week participation has hit an all-time low is that “everyone is afraid of what others think of them.” Another MLHS junior expressed a similar idea, that it “scares people” when there’s no guarantee that others will dress up. The result? A decidedly unspirited student body.
Besides the fear of embarrassment, there were some practical reasons for our spiritless situation. One MLHS junior guessed that most students don’t care to devote time to Spirit-Week-outfit preparation: “people don’t want to put in the effort to go and buy a Hawaiian shirt for Luau Day.” Another MLHS junior said that the coincidental extreme weather during the week prevented her from dressing up for Spirit Week.
A couple of other students surmised that many students simply don’t have time to think about anything besides their schoolwork. One student said that “people are so focused on work that they forget they can have fun.” Another said that “we are all still wrapped up in the next test, quiz, or project that we don’t really have time to care much about Spirit Week—Laker spirit is seriously lacking.” Is there any solution to the homework overflow that seemed to occur during spirit week? Perhaps students’ homework should be limited to allow full engagement.
Aside from a lack of effort on the part of students, perhaps our school isn’t doing something that neighboring high schools are. We gathered some information about nearby high schools and their approaches to Spirit Week and discovered some interesting trends. One Morris Knolls freshman reported, “A lot of pep rallies focus on sports. All the students cheer as the sports teams walk through the middle of [the gym].” This sounds familiar. Doesn’t MLHS also hold pep rallies with sports teams and a lot of cheering? So what makes the difference in Spirit Week for other schools? It’s important to note that, until 2018, MLHS hadn’t held pep rallies in many years, if ever. Perhaps founding Lakers had an aversion to Spirit Week; maybe a lack of spirit is written into Laker DNA.
One Kinnelon freshman explained that “the upperclassmen tell [the rest of the student body] at the beginning of the school year that you kind of look out of place if you don’t participate.” He continued to explain that there’s a lot of importance placed on school spirit and Spirit Week in general; Kinnelon juniors and seniors really do encourage underclassmen to participate. Do MLHS upperclassmen do the same? Not according to one MLHS junior, who says that “[MLHS] upperclassman need to step it up and really encourage [Spirit Week].” Perhaps one solution to MLHS’s lack-of-spirit problem is having upperclassmen get freshmen and sophomores more involved and excited.
A Randolph senior explained that students at her school get points in frisbee and volleyball tournaments and they also have a student v. staff volleyball game to engage everyone in school spirit. She also said that her school holds fundraisers and competitions and that “dressing up and having a sense of pride for not only your grade but the whole school is awesome and probably makes many people more interested in getting involved.”
MLHS isn’t alone in its lack of spirit, however. One Morris Hills freshman admitted that students at her school, too, lack interest in spirit week: “not everyone dresses up [during spirit week] and the only thing that is taken really seriously throughout the whole school is the football game at the end of the week.”
It would be easy to simply say, “Just do it! Dress up!” However, that would be hypocritical as I surely didn’t dress up for spirit week probably for the same reasons almost no one else did. There’s no clear solution to our spiritlessness dilemma, but perhaps examining other nearby, more-spirited schools and asking students for suggestions can point us in the right direction.
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