The annual Winter Dance hosted by Student Council, set to take place on Jan. 26, was canceled the day prior due to low interest. Only 129 tickets were sold.
In past years, the event has been a formal dance that welcomes outside dates; however, this year it was supposed to be a mixer-style dollar dance that would have been informal and not allow outside students while also held on a Friday evening. STUCO president senior Arun Halder said the dance being on a Friday and informal led to low interest and resulted in the cancellation.
“I think the fact this year was informal was the main issue and [it] being on a Friday night. I think more people want to dress up for these occasions rather than coming to an informal dance,” Halder said.
In agreement, senior Madison Riney said the informal dance was the reason for her and her friends not wanting to attend.
“For me and my friends, we would’ve wanted to go if it was formal because we didn’t feel like going if we weren’t going to dress up,” Riney said.
The low amount of ticket sales led administration to cancel the dance on Jan. 25, a day before it was meant to take place. The day before the cancellation, head principal Dr. Emily McCown sent out a Student Square email to parents to push their kids to buy tickets if they were interested in attending. After lunch sales on Jan. 25, McCown said STUCO sold under their ideal number of tickets and made the ultimate decision to cancel the dance.
“We were around 125 [tickets sold] after lunch on Thursday, so we were thinking if we were under 300 it would be a little too small to really host a dance at that number. If we were close to 200 [ticket sales] on Thursday, I probably would’ve felt a little more comfortable letting it run,” McCown said.
STUCO sponsor Thomas Cassilly said he and co-sponsor Jill Grimshaw did not want to cancel the dance.
“The ticket [sales] were low but we thought that we should still do it because we didn’t want to take away a dance from the kids who bought tickets, so administration decided that it was just best to cancel,” Cassilly said.
On Jan. 31, Cassilly, Grimshaw, Halder, Vice President junior Willow Powell, Public Relations Officer Madi Koke, and sophomore representative Trevi Guest met with McCown and Activities Director Mitch Lefkowitz to discuss future changes that can be made to Winter Dances to increase attendance and school spirit. Grimshaw said they hope to bring back the old version of the dance and listen to student voices more.
“We talked about going back to a Saturday and going back to formal, that was the biggest response we heard from students, so we want to give the people what they want. We also talked about changing our publicity and how we promote things to the school,” Grimshaw said.
Also hoping to get more participation in spirit weeks and school activities in general, Grimshaw said they plan to change up a few things and hope to get teachers to encourage spirit as well,
“Student Council is going to work on updating what we promote for school spirit and how we choose to promote it, how we communicate to the school, and we want to utilize [Ac Lab] homeroom time more and try to get teachers to get involved more and listen to what the people have to say and however they want to show their school spirit,” Grimshaw said.
