In Rock Bridge tradition, the spring assembly offered more recognition to the school’s athletics than it did to all the recent accomplishments of RBHS combined.
It’s not that athletics were not deserving of recognition, but kids in other areas have done amazing things at this school, and there was just a disproportionate amount of recognition going around.
The assembly was only 49 minutes long, and 15 of those minutes were dedicated entirely to sports. There was the state-win spiel athletics director Jen Mast gives at most assemblies, a competition among spring sports athletes and recognitions for the numerous spring sports’ season.
Granted, RBHS has a very sports-oriented culture, and it’s almost a given that sports will shine more than any other activity regardless of how well anything else does, but this heavy emphasis on sports while ignoring state and national wins in academic and artistic areas is disappointing.
Even within the realm of sports, there is inequity. This year the school held a send-off assembly for the girls basketball team’s trip to the final four, and last year, boys basketball was the only sport deserving enough for such a pep assembly. Yet six of our fall and winter sports teams made trips to the equivalent of a final four showdown.
While it’s perfectly fair to celebrate good news, like a state win, 26 percent of the assembly does not need to celebrate one group of students. Thirteen minutes were devoted to sports, and eight minutes were devoted to recognizing the accomplishments of every other student group.
Perhaps most disappointing is fewer than six minutes were spent announcing student council candidates. Fewer than six minutes. That’s less than a minute per candidate.
Candidates were only announced with the student body president reading a brief quote about why each candidate likes RBHS. A brief note encouraged students to watch videos on the RBHS home page for more information. Only a small percentage of students will go onto the homepage to make an informed decision on for whom to vote.
Not only does this produce an uninformed public, but it also reinforces the idea that student council elections are nothing more than popularity contests. Without the speeches people were just making brash judgments of character. They could not possibly know the work each candidate did or did not put into student council in the past, they only had one quote from which to base a vote off of, along with the number of punny posters around the school.
To their credit, sports teams work hard. They spend hours after school practicing. But they’re really not the only ones
The assembly’s emphasis on sports resulted in severe lack of attention to almost every other club in the school save Varsity Acting Squad, and inadequate information presented about each student body candidate made the assembly less worthy of an excuse to miss class. Assembly times need to be more meticulously apportioned to avoid the egregious favoritism that existed at this assembly.
By Avantika Khatri