While they may be our cross-town rivals in the field of sports, HHS is becoming a role model for RBHS Student Council with their way of running Homecoming Week.

Looking at incorporating a fundraising component into homecoming activities, RBHS Student Council considered having nominees take on the responsibility of choosing a charity to represent and pull funds for, similar to the duties that HHS homecoming queen nominees take on.

“We talked about it in Student Council this year, but it was kind of out of our control because we didn’t start homecoming meetings early enough to where it was a possibility,” senior Student Council representative Hayley Wilson said. “By the time we’d had our first homecoming meeting, it was something where we were like, ‘This is still something that we want to do’, but because of how our meetings were scheduled this year, it wasn’t a possibility, sadly.”

If Student Council decided to make fundraising a part of court activities, the nominees would be named a month and a week in advance rather than a week in advance, allowing those senior girls a full month to start raising awareness and funds for their cause.

Although lack of planning time halted efforts to enact this change, Wilson still hopes that fundraising will become a tradition for future classes.

“It’s something we would really like for getting the junior class, especially, on board for doing that next year because it has just so much more depth to it,” Wilson said. “It’s something that I really want to see brought on.”

While the idea of reconstructing homecoming to become more community-centered was put on hold, Student Council did revise the nomination process. Instead of using a list of all senior girls, Student Council requested that students submit names of seniors they believed deserved the title of homecoming queen as the first step of the nomination process.

“We talked about how seniors are overwhelmed with the vast majority of the list,” junior Student Council representative Anna Hickman said. “It was brought up at a smaller meeting and then brought to a bigger meeting, then we all discussed. It was an idea that kinda grew.”

With an altered nomination process and the proposed incorporation of fundraising, next year’s homecoming week is likely to hold new changes with the aim of making the process more efficient and the experience more enjoyable.

“Every year, it’s worth kind of reconsidering how things are done and freshening things up and kind of making sure they match the times,” RBHS Activities Director Dr. David  Bones said. “So I think we will after homecoming — like we do with any event — reflect on how it went, revisit it and see if there’s changes to be made to make it even better in subsequent years.”

By Alice Yu