School spirit can be an extremely valuable asset to a school community. It brings people together, and can often be fun to participate in. We at The Current believe that Bear River desperately lacks school spirit.
Bear River students agreed that school spirit can be a great thing.
“It shows that everyone’s involved in making school a more fun place … I think most of them (students) think it’s a fun thing,” said Sophomore Jamie Stroer.
Junior Connor Ronka agreed with Stroer.
“It encourages students involved in academics and sports to do really well, and feel pride in their school, and want to do well because of that,” said Ronka.
But when it comes to the actual levels of school spirit, they appear to be at a low point. You can see this reflected in the spirit days where students only participate if it’s easy to do, and at football games, where touchdowns are met with little to no enthusiasm.
In fact, a poll put out on the Bear River Current Instagram revealed that, out of 100 students polled, 75% of them thought that Bear River doesn’t have enough school spirit. This leads The Current to believe that students are painfully aware of this rapidly deteriorating enthusiasm for our school.
“I’d say it’s lower than it was before because Besler left, and Besler was like, ‘Yeah, school spirit!’” said Ronka. “People joke about school spirit at this point just because there’s so much of a lack of it.”
“The school used to be a lot more into the rallies and there were more cool events, but now they’ve kind of simmered down … we’re not as involved or informed as other schools, and I think we could have better communication,” said Senior Calder Wilson.
Many Bruins believe that Bear River has school spirit, just not enough.
“We could have more [school spirit], but we have a good amount, we’re not lacking it,” said Junior Hailey Hughes.
Others like Junior Katelyn Lorenzo agree with Hughes.
“We definitely have school spirit but we can definitely have more,” said Lorenzo. “I love spirit days and I think that everyone should have as much as they can because it’s super fun and it shows how much you love your school! I always do spirit days and go all out for some of them—I encourage others to do as well .”
Senior Maggie O’Callaghan, the ASB president, explained how she thinks the freshmen class may bring some more spirit.
“I think school spirit is higher than it was last year, just because … it’s a really big freshman class, and it always helps to have bigger classes,” said O’Callaghan. “Since they’re all new, I think high school’s still super exciting for them, and they want to be involved.”
Other sources have also reported that freshmen are more interested in supporting school spirit.
“Not very many people try anymore, but there are a bunch of freshmen who are overly school spirited,” said Junior Karissa Johnson.
Others disagree with the amount of freshmen participation, believing the polar opposite, that the younger students actually account for a lot of the loss of school spirit.
“Freshmen don’t do much,” said Hughes. “There are only a few freshmen that try, and then sophomores and up really try.”
Junior Annabella Thornbury recently moved here from another school and says we actually have higher school spirit than other schools she has gone to.
“I’d say that [school spirit’s] a lot more important here, everybody participates a lot more, and everybody dresses up for the homecoming days and goes to the football games,” said Thornbury.
Leadership Teacher and Activities Director Matt MacDonald expressed his opinion.
“I think our school spirit this year is probably greater than it was last year,” said Mr. MacDonald. “My evidence would be that last year we had Homecoming, we had probably like 295 people at Homecoming, this year we had 375.”
These numbers, however, don’t necessarily translate to that actual feeling of unity and are likely inflated by the fact that we have more people this year than last year. Last year’s graduating senior class was one of the smallest ever at Bear River, and this year there are 169 new freshmen.
It’s also not surprising that those in Leadership, such as O’Callaghan and Mr. MacDonald, believe that school spirit is really high.
“I think here it’s more of a Leadership thing, so if you’re in Leadership, then you’re more inclined to have school spirit, and if you’re not in the programs, then you’re out of the loop,” said Wilson.
Some students think that spirit days cause many of the issues with school spirit.
“Our school has close to zero school spirit, and it’s because people just don’t care, or we don’t hear about spirit days until the day before,” said Johnson. “It’s also hard because the spirit days are always the same.”
The fact that there are these conflicting ideas among the students proves that school spirit isn’t really present. After all, the point of it is to help unify us as a school, and, if it only unifies a select few, then it’s not really doing its job.
Luckily, students think things can be done to help improve school spirit.
“The spirit days should be fun and easy for the students to participate in, like the 50’s (day),” said Senior Wyatt Sikora. “That was easy, people have leather jackets, they can do all the hairstyles.”
Junior Becca Reese agreed with Sikora.
“We really don’t [participate] most of the time because it’s a hassle to find outfits for spirit days,” said Reese. “Try to make spirit days group friendly.”
All in all, there is a lot of room for improvement. 75% of students thinking our school spirit is too low is much too large of a number. If we hope to achieve as much as, or more than, other schools, we have to dedicate ourselves toward improving the Bear River community through school spirit.
