Spirit! Let’s hear it! Last week, Valley celebrated the winter sports season with a pep rally and a variety of spirit days. Students wore their PJ’s on Monday, dressed like lumberjacks Tuesday, sported double denim or groutfits  Wednesday, jerseys for the Super Bowl Thursday and camo for Jungle Day on Friday.  

School spirit days have received mixed reviews from both the student body and members of the Student Council Association.

Clay Grisius, a junior who is on the SCA, is part of the decision making process that includes coming up with ideas and then presenting them for evaluation. 

“We have an SCA class with a bunch of representatives,” Grisius said. “Our representatives get ideas from either the student population or themselves. We brainstorm ideas, and they send them to the administration for approval.”

SCA does its best to appease the desires of the school community when selecting spirit day themes, but according to Anna Geng-Gao, responses submitted from the teenage student body are often inappropriate for school.

“What the kids want isn’t always necessarily what’s appropriate for the school,” said the sophomore. “For example, a lot of kids wanted a white lie day, which the admin disapproved of, because that’s literally having kids write on their shirts, and you don’t know what they’re gonna write. Some kids might write something that’s not school appropriate.”

Those spirit day themes that do get chosen elicit many different reactions from the Valley community. 

“I’m not that impressed. They’re kind of lame,” junior Lauren Mock said. “I also go to the Academies and they have done some pretty fun ones, like we were able to have ‘anything but a backpack’ day. That was really funny because you can see kids walking around with shopping carts and stuff.” 

Sophomore Julia Seeley and freshman Hiba Rizvi share a similar sentiment.

“I think we should do other things besides the same ones,” Seeley said. “I feel like we do a lot of the same spirit days.”

“I think this week’s spirit days have been better than the past few weeks,” Rizvi said. “Just because it’s different, but I think that our school can do better.”

Senior Ryan Lindemeyer appreciates the SCA’s creativity despite the many guidelines and stipulations its members must abide by.

“I like them,” Lindemeyer said. “They’re at least a little bit more creative than the last ones. They’re not that bad.”

Along with being creative, Valley’s spirit days are ways for the whole school to enjoy themselves, not just the students.

“I enjoy our spirit days, I think they’re pretty fun,” said Grisius. “They allow teachers to participate as well. Sometimes more popular spirit days, like anything but a backpack day, have limited involvement for some people. So these definitely allow everybody including the faculty to participate.”