On the week of March 1st, ROHS Student Council ran Charity Week, a collection of events and activities meant to raise money for Habitat for Humanity.
The activities hosted by StuCo included a trivia night, volleyball tournament, bagel sale, open mic lunch, and spirit themes for each day. StuCo vice president Stella Rogers said that the events were all chosen due to their successes in previous years, but the club found new ways to improve
them.
“We’ll start with things we’ve done in the past, and then we’ll think about if it went well, if the student body liked it, if we could do it again but differently, all of those different things.” said Rogers.
Both Rogers and StuCo teacher advisor Sean Morgan stated that all events had a good student turnout, and Rogers said that she personally noticed more participation in the spirit themes than in previous Charity Weeks.
“In past years it felt like we were struggling to get kids to do spirit weeks, ” said Rogers. “But I feel like this year, I personally saw a significant amount of people participating, which was really cool to see. Other than that, everywhere else had pretty good turnouts.”
In previous years, Charity Week culminated with the Charity Ball, a formal school dance similar to Homecoming. This year,
StuCo attempted to reimagine the ball into a broader event with more activities, called Charity Bash. The event was cancelled a day before it was planned to happen in a mass email from principal Donal Loomis.
Morgan said that the decision to cancel the event was due to low ticket sales that cast doubt on the total attendance of the event.
“If there’s a single, not getting to the nitty-gritty answer, it would just be that ticket sales were not as high as we would have hoped going into the event,” said Morgan. “Who knows how many kids would have showed up the day of? It was a tough call, but we have so many people volunteering their time, like chaperones and teachers and people from other organizations… it was just a little too risky, I guess.”
Rogers added on to this, stating that the high level of collaboration the event had with other clubs could’ve led to those groups being disappointed by potential low attendance.
“There were so many different clubs and people involved in it, we felt bad having them all come out- putting all the puzzle pieces together for limited people to be there to appreciate the work that would’ve been put in.”
StuCo plans on continuing the tradition of a central event for Charity Week in future years. With an influx of new inspired underclassmen, Rogers said that she’s confident the next generation of StuCo leadership will find new ways to revitalize Charity Bash.
“Even though [Charity Bash] didn’t end up happening this year, there will definitely be something to come that I think will replace and perform its task as swimmingly, if not better… With the freshman year class, it’s crazy how much school spirit and dedication they have to trying new things and getting involved. If that’s an upward trend that keeps going with new incoming classes, their school culture will produce something that’s going to be really exciting to see.”
