Everyone has lots of excitement for the new school year but next week, we will kick it up a notch with “Spirit Days” at our school. It is a chance for the students and teachers to dress down for a day (or three) and to get to know each other a little bit better before the school year continues.

I remember the HS election speeches when I first started at the school in the early 1990s. Almost every candidate would say “there’s no school spirit” (and then proceed to lay out their platform for increasing school spirit, which, in hindsight obviously didn’t work because the same speech was used the following year!). After the assembly, the teachers would shake their heads and say that we thought there was lots of school spirit but we didn’t get a vote so it didn’t matter what we thought anyway!

I would like to bring some of those election candidates back to the school now. If they watched one of the Play Days, came to the high school mixer, spent just 5 minutes at the Inside Ride or any number of the events on our packed school calendar, I know their reaction would be incredulous but very positive. There are only 15 days in the entire school year where our calendar (link) doesn’t have at least one event listed (including next Monday, oddly enough). We haven’t added in any sports games and many of the field trips yet, so I am guessing that by the end of the year there will be less than 5 days when “nothing” happened (as far as the calendar was concerned at least).

Chris Starkey
Administrative Principal
Mentor College / TEAM School