Every day after school from January to mid-February, Highland students can be found crammed into the gym balcony, surrounded by yards upon yards of poster paper, frantically drawing. The stakes are high and everyone in the room is on edge.

Spirit Week is only three weeks away and Highland’s class officers are feeling the heat.

“I am honestly just excited for it to be over,” junior vice-president Olivia Romney said.

Most people at Highland come to school during Spirit Week excited to participate in the Spirit Bowl and see the cool, thematic art in the halls without recognizing the incredible amount of work that is put into Spirit Week every year. Preparation begins just a couple of months into the school year when officers have to agree on a class theme. Choosing the theme is considered nightmarish by the officers because of the disagreements that often ensue.

Sadly, choosing the theme is just the beginning of a long and wild ride.

In the weeks following winter break, class officers take measurements of their respective hallways, come up with t-shirt designs, and begin to plan the partner dance and lip sync for their class. About a month before Spirit Week, the officers are encouraged to start working on the art for their hallway. However, despite the fact that it is only three weeks away, some of the classes are falling behind.

“Juniors are ahead of everyone else, but we’re still really behind,” Romney said. “We’ve been tracing our transparencies, so we’re ahead of sophomores and seniors who haven’t even started.”

In order to get as many people to help with Spirit Week preparations as possible, officers have created things like groupMes, sent out tweets, and some are even planning on going on HTVS. However, because so many people, including the officers themselves, are involved in sports and other after school extracurriculars, recruitment hasn’t been easy. Additionally, each class must find people willing to participate in the different Spirit Bowl activities like the obstacle course, partner dance, and lip sync, which is yet another challenging task.

It’s difficult to imagine putting hundreds of hours of work into Spirit Week on top of sports, homework, and the other activities that all of the officers are involved in, but despite so many challenges, the officers are persevering and looking forward to the outcome of all of their hard work.

That doesn’t mean that they still don’t need all the help they can get, however. 

Romney perfectly summed it up when she said, “Spirit week is great. Awesome. We’re all so stressed…We just need help, we’ve resorted to begging people. It’s all good.”

Spirit Week is coming up the week of February 15th, and Highland students can look forward to this year’s creative themes: Freshman of the Fire Nation, Savage Sophomores, Jinkies Juniors, and Space Jam Seniors.