Spirit Week isn’t really fun anymore. 

As you walk down the halls of Brien McMahon during spirit week you barely see anyone in theme for the day. No one is dressed up in their class colors and can’t tell who is a freshman or not because everyone is wearing black. (Yes it’s true freshman has to wear black for spirit week)

“It does get repetitive and I feel like it should just happen twice a year,” says Briela McManamon who is a student here at McMahon.

 Students are participating less in spirit week as the year goes by. I remember at the beginning of the year I would see the craziest things during spirit week. For example, people would go crazy for a red, white, and blue day. 

However, towards the end of the school year, no one is participating anymore. Last month’s spirit week wasn’t the best, to be frank. We tried to do a TikTok for last spirit week but barely anyone dressed up. For example, during character day, I couldn’t tell if students were a character or not. 

Spirit Week is meant to be an exciting time for everyone in school. Since our school constantly does it it drains the fun out of it and causes students to not participate.  At this point, it shouldn’t be called spirit week anymore because it feels like no one has any spirit during that week.

A solution to this is having less spirit week throughout the school year. I’ve had my peers recommend that we have it three times a school year: one before homecoming, one before Christmas, and one before the pep rally at the end of the year. 

As someone who has a sister who was a student here before COVID and had fewer spirit weeks, I remember seeing her peers and her dress up for spirit week. They would have so much fun with it, they would go all out. For example, on red, white, and blue days I would see pictures of her and her friends. 

We had a spirit week a couple of months ago and no one knew about it. When I told my friends about spirit week they all had two responses; “It’s spirit week?” or “no one is dressed up.” This is a sign we need to have less spirit week. 

A possible reason why our school constantly does spirit week can be that it doesn’t cost money and it’s a way to help with school spirit. However, there are other ways to bring up school spirit without doing so many spirit weeks without spending a lot of money For example, LipDub, potlucks, or bring back Earth Day. 

“Spirit week should be more original if it’s going to be more frequent. Pajamas Day is a great excuse for repetition and the class colors need to change more. I’ve been a junior and I’ve only dressed up as red,” says Roman Surena-Mattson, a junior at McMahon. 

There are so many themes out there that this school hasn’t tried yet and we can get ideas from social media. Some unique theme ideas we can do are anything but legs day, student-teacher swap, Royal vs. Rubbish, or Rhyme without a reason day.

Brien McMahon should try to explore different ways to bring spirit back to our school. If we continually do the same thing throughout the year, people will get tired of it and won’t participate. But with a click of a button, we can get inspiration from schools in TikTok for activities we can do.