By Jenna Yingling ‘21
In these unprecedented times, few may be surprised to hear that Conestoga Valley High School’s usual Homecoming traditions will be modified in order to accommodate social distancing guidelines. Events including the bonfire and dance have been cancelled, and spectators other than family and the court will not be permitted at the football game.
However, the Student Council has been working tirelessly to maintain some of the usual activities that students look forward to annually.
“We’re doing the same games that we normally do, and it’s just all video format at this point,” Student Council advisor, Jesse Shenk, explained. “So, we’re still presenting the court. You’ll still see them walking into the gym, and then it’ll still have the same video where we introduce the court to the school, and they’ll do their interviews with their escorts. They are working on an escort dance as well.”
The club members predicted in May that the dance was most likely not going to happen, but the group collectively decided that they were dedicated to recognizing Homecoming and the court in some form.
“We did decide as a club that we were committed to producing something for Homecoming knowing that we couldn’t do the dance,” Shenk recollected.
Thus, with very limited time and ideas, the Student Council scrambled to brainstorm and plan an adapted Homecoming. They concluded that filming would be the most feasible way to showcase the activities.
“We settled on trying to do as many normal things as we can and just put it on film and see if we can manage that,” he explained.
Preparing to film the pep rally posed new challenges for the club members involved. Instead of cramming the games, court introductions, and escort dance into a one-hour period, the pep rally was filmed in segments over one week. Shenk described the traditional Homecoming preparations as a “well-oiled machine,” so presenting the pep rally in an entirely different way complicated the creation process.
However, after coming back from a spring of isolation and uncertainty, Student Council recognized the immense importance of integrating some normalcy back into student life. Shenk mused that familiarity offers a sense of comfort to many people.
“Just because something always happens doesn’t mean we have to keep doing it,” asserted Shenk. “The officers felt, and the club felt that doing those things gives us kind of something stable.”
On the other hand, Shenk considered that doing something completely different than the usual Homecoming plan may work well for other schools.
“As much as I talked about keeping things normal, you can just completely do something new, it’s the perfect year for that,” he advised. “Do whatever you can do to make people enjoy the experience as much as they can and have as much fun with it as you can.”
Overall, Shenk hopes to create a positive experience for the high school’s student body.
“I am excited that the Homecoming court can walk out on the football field, because I see how much it means to the people on the court and the community,” he added. “Personally, I’m just excited to walk out there and feel like I’m doing something that we normally would’ve done.”
This was a great experience for the school and community.
This was something that the school and community really needed especially in these unprecedented times. Being a freshman made it hard to expect what homecoming week was going to look like. Being on student council and helping to plan homecoming week was an amazing experience and to see the video showing all the hard work we put into it was really cool. All of the student council members and Mr. Shenk did an amazing job with the tough deck of cards we were dealt this year.