Students Dance the Neon Night Away

Imagine pink, blue, green and yellow stripes of light reflecting off a polished wood floor, shining on the walls above the bleachers.

This is what happens when student council takes over the night with “Neon Nights” in the main gym for the homecoming dance on Oct. 1.

After weeks of planning, including having to figure out a theme, get a DJ booked for the dance, getting decorations ready, selling the tickets and holding a pep rally, the homecoming dance was finally held in the main gym.

Originally, the dance was scheduled to take place on the football field, but was moved indoors due to inclement weather.

Andrew Warren, history teacher and co-adviser of homecoming, hopes that after selling 775 tickets to the dance that the student body enjoyed themselves.

“… [We hope we provided] an opportunity for the student body to come together [to] …celebrate and enjoy each other’s company in a safe atmosphere that promotes positive school culture and pride in being a student at SHS,” Warren said.

Senior Anne Jackson was the winner of the homecoming queen vote, crowned at the homecoming football game.

“I was thinking to myself, ‘no way this is happening,’” Jackson said. “I literally looked at my mom [and] was like ‘no way.’”

Warren, math teacher and co-adviser Alison Altemose and vice president of student council Grace Hall explain that they had to learn the planning process for an event as big as homecoming for the first time.

“The process for planning homecoming can be very chaotic at times because there are a lot of moving parts,” Warren said.

Warren and the council were able to overcome this by taking it one step at a time.

Altemose, who has prior experience with planning events like homecoming in college, feels that to properly plan “Neon Nights,” student council had to think of the final product.

“It’s really about looking at your end goal and seeing how you want to accomplish that end goal,” Altemose said.“… we mapped out like a list of themes…,” Altemose said. “…once we figured out the theme, then were like ‘now we can put together a promotion video to announce the theme…we can think about what tickets are [going to] look like… then we… [decided] where…we [wanted] it…Do we want it inside? Do we want it outside? …we [then decided we needed] to reserve the field.”

Altemose also highlighted that the committee had to plan around the ongoing construction project, the parent drop off and pick up area, and parking lots.

Hall had looked forward to seeing the homecoming dance come to life.

“My favorite part is walking into homecoming and seeing all of your work put together into the [dance],” Hall said. “It’s just a really exciting process, and it’s fun to actually see it come together and all your hard work come to an end.”