Behind the scenes of Homecoming

Homecoming involves preparation from many students in order to host a successful dance

Staff Writer

On Saturday, October 26, American hosted their annual Homecoming Dance. The dance often holds over one thousand students so a lot of preparation is required to execute a fun and safe event.

“The ASB executives work about a month to a month and a half prior to Homecoming to figure out all the logistics and work on the decorations we want to put on out, the overall theme, how ticket sales are going to work, and the different aspects of games and what they involve,” said ASB Vice President Ayush Sharma (11).

Leadership teacher Mr. Anderson explained how he oversees the setup of Homecoming and how he helps students to put on this dance. “Those mainly responsible for setting up the dance are those in Leadership, but also the ASB executives who all organize it. They organize layout and how activities are going to be laid out in the rotunda. So it’s pretty much the leadership class and me who set the dance up.” In addition to the dance, Regal Homecoming Court is chosen from a group of several seniors voted on by the entire student body. “The executives who are not seniors work on Homecoming Court and collect votes to decide who the Homecoming regals are going to be, so we have three rounds of nominations,” said Sharma.

When asked about the differences in preparation for Homecoming from other events that are not hosted on campus, Mr. Anderson explained how much more effort is involved for both him and Leadership students. “During Prom, we do not do any decorations for it which we provide, instead, every venue that we pick is already set up for decorations like last year at Lake Chalet for example. Most of those things we plan a lot in advance but on the day of the dance we just show up but for Homecoming I get here at 8 o’clock in the morning and students come around 9 and we do all the decorations and what not for about three to four hours and the vendors usually arrive throughout the day,” said Mr. Anderson.

Students in Leadership often contribute to the setup of the dance, keeping the opinions and hopes of the collective student body in mind. “We first reach out to students to survey what they think the Homecoming themes should be for a given year, we usually get a lot of responses and narrow it down to which responses had the most votes, from this. The executives and the Leadership class work together to choose a final theme that would best benefit the student body and almost every time, the theme that we choose is appreciated by the general student body,” said Sharma.

Aside from decorations, various third-party services are offered at Homecoming for student’s enjoyment. “The third-party items such as the games and the DJ come from a party-planner which we have. He has different options that are available to us. For the DJs, we usually have to book first because they have tight scheduling but as for the vendors we go through the company for party planning and they usually have a lot of things available to us,” Anderson said.