Homecoming 2019 left a piece of unfading memory as teacher and student involvement rose, even with an early start. Besides a late September start, about two weeks earlier than last year, there were many other changes to this year’s edition.

Arthur Beck, new student activities manager, however, did not think a lot had changed rather than people getting more involved and students being excited and helping out with the Disney decorations. A lot of behind the scenes happened throughout the week of homecoming.

“The student council at the beginning of the year, as we will every year, decided the theme. They got together and decided whatever they thought would be good for the students and for the whole school to do as well. I think Disney is so large and it corporates so many characters with Star Wars, Cars, and Nemo. I mean Disney is everything and Pixar and they thought it would be a good idea to do that and just to have more of a large participation by everyone since Disney is so easy to do,” Mr. Beck said.

Student council president Alejandra Lopez, 12, said one of the changes she made with the others is bringing more alumni and showing them how generations of students at Bowie show their pride and traditions. With the student council and guidance of Mr. Beck, they agreed on having this year’s homecoming be Disney related.

“We were originally going to do it only Marvel because of class of 2020 and since there is a character on Marvel that’s called Vision, 2020 would relate to it perfectly. We wanted it but we wanted to generalize it so that more people would be willing to dress up,” Lopez said.

Jacob Gutierrez, 12, who is also involved in student council and was the emcee with Lopez for the assembly, noticed that this year was more successful than last year since this year more students were being involved in the activities.

“I think what’s changed has been the student involvement, like the student activities that we have for them. We’ve seen a lot of change in a good way this year. The students are more involved and are more active than they were last year,” Gutierrez said.

On Wednesday, it was Parent-Teacher conference and it was also a half day and Lopez and Gutierrez pointed out that they had to step back a day since they wouldn’t have that much time on their hands to have fun.

“Not only the half day on Wednesday and also on Friday not having school because that’s two lost days to do something at lunch. We couldn’t be here really for decorations and it’s just time that we needed to have more festivities that could’ve been planned with the full five days. Hopefully next year the football team and athletics department chooses a full week so that we can have a full week of homecoming. It affected the last couple of years I believe and we don’t get an excited Friday in the football game since we didn’t have school that day. Of course Wednesday being a half day, the kids go home a little bit earlier and they enjoyed the half day and it was also parent conference that day so I was really busy with parent conference and being busy with homecoming,” Lopez said.

On Thursday, it was a bit peculiar since we the parade went on right after schoolbut the assembly was at night instead of during the last hour-and-a-half during classes.

“This year we wanted to make it at night because we were going to have fireworks but there was a misunderstanding in our paperwork but that’s mostly why we wanted it so that people could come after work. If we would have it during school, they wouldn’t be able to come and enjoy the assembly,”Lopez said.

Mr. Beck said that the homecoming parade went great since over 60 cars and 60 organizations participated along with sponsors and alumni. The parade hadn’t been that long and some people were giving him feedback that they’d never seen the parade that long before. Also, people were collaborating to make this happen. At the assembly, more alumni showed up at night, even though the entire student body couldn’t make it as it would be during the day. The alumni association, multiple reunion classes and even esteemed alum, such as two graduates from the ‘30s, were in attendance.

“It was at night because we wanted to implement the idea of fireworks and we wanted to do a change and we just wanted more alumni to be a part of it so that way at night maybe more alumni could show up,” Gutierrez said.

Lopez said this year regardless of the decorations, parade, assembly, games, and dress up days, she has seen a lot of more involvement from teachers. They have learned to understand the perspective of others and that not everyone thinks the same but different ideas can come together as one and create a whole brilliant idea.

“I think other changes that we have done is pretty much the way we look at things like it’s not like last year how it was like the same people running things. We actually have more involvement and that’s the biggest change we have seen so far,” Gutierrez said.

Mr. Beck said that they tried to make people be part of homecoming, create new games, and also supports all the ideas of the student body and if the idea can be done, then it will be done.

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