Homecoming assembly is the “best yet”

Serena Bettis • October 25, 2016

Homecoming week gives students the opportunity to show as much school spirit as they can – whether that involves dressing up for spirit days during the week, participating in after school activities such as powder puff football and peach fuzz volleyball, or going to the bonfire. Many students went all out for each spirit day, and on Tuesday, October 18, students who wore pink in support of Breast Cancer Awareness month received a discount on their homecoming ticket. Pajama Day was on Monday, and sophomore Jane Wu said that was her favorite day of the week “because it was comfy and effortless.” Flannel day, or “Lumberjack Day”, as some people like to call it, was on Wednesday, October 19, before the bonfire, and that Thursday was twin day. Students either coordinated outfits in large groups or matched with their best friend or sibling. Sophomore Amy Plum preferred Fossil Friday, when “everyone got to show off their school spirit.”

Below is a slideshow with pictures of students who showed their spirit each day of the week.

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At Fossil Ridge High School, students can also participate in the annual homecoming assembly by assisting with its production or performing at it. The assembly is put on by members of student council and Ridge TV, and often features performances from the choir, dance, and cheer team. Katie Reed, a senior in Ridge TV, was this year’s assembly producer. An assembly producer typically organizes people and crew positions, along with the timing and scheduling of the assembly. For this assembly alone, students spent over eighteen hours on its production. “We started set up at lunch on Thursday, and some of us were there until one in the morning. Most people were back at school between five and six,” Reed claimed.

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This assembly was special for the seniors, as it was the first time they got to walk into an assembly as the oldest class in the school and take their seats on the gym floor. Fossil’s marching band played pep tunes while the seniors walked in, and their entrance was made extra-special by the fact that they got to walk in on a red carpet placed in front of the gym in accordance with the homecoming theme, “Old Hollywood.”

Chris Martella and Paige Otto served as the emcees for the assembly, announcing the members of the homecoming court and cracking jokes in between performances. Both the dance and cheer team’s performances were crowd favorites. During the dance team’s performance, members from the football team took over, improvising their dance moves and ignoring the moves previously taught to them by the dance team. Rather than just having the varsity cheer team do a routine, Fossil’s Unified Cheer team performed, featuring special needs students in green and white tutus. “I loved how much support there was for the Unified cheer team, and how everyone was freaking out about the football players dancing instead of the dance team,” said Reed.

Reed was proud of how the assembly turned out, and said that it went “surprisingly well.” Often times students do not enjoy assemblies because they are extra cheesy or boring, but Reed thinks that “a lot of students liked the simplicity of it and the ability to focus on the actual people being recognized and performing.” It is one of the most highly praised assemblies Reed has ever been involved with, and she hopes that in the future Ridge TV will be able to do even better.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.