Photo by Hannah Markov

A group of students cheer at a pep rally. Some teens don’t participate in school spirit because of negative feelings towards SGA sponsored events.

The new SGA officers have recently been elected, bringing in an array of ideas for the coming school year. Plans for tailgates, additional school dances and better spirit week themes have all been introduced as means of bringing the student body together in school spirit. However for some students, these SGA sponsored activities spark little interest.

“I don’t see why it’s so important that I like my school because I don’t hate it, but it’s not the greatest place in the world and I don’t think that my enthusiasm needs to be hyped up,” sophomore Mia Smith said.

Another primary reason for lack of interest are the strong ties that many SGA activities hold to sports, such as the homecoming dance and student-staff basketball game. For students who find little to no interest in school athletics, this can be a huge deterrent and can cause them to alienate themselves from the rest of the student body.

“I don’t really care about sports and most of the spirit is about supporting the sports teams,” Smith said. “Watching somebody move a ball back and forth across the field is just not interesting.”

For sophomore Linnea Hultman, a major ground for not going to school-sponsored events is her friends’ deficit of enthusiasm.

“I don’t know anyone who goes to those things,” Hultman said. “If no one I know goes, then there’s no point for me to.”

Both students agree that the actions of the rising SGA officers will be scarcely different from this year’s, and that the SGA has no real power to do the things that they promised, such as getting better toilet paper.

“I think that the apathy of students is really high here at WJ because they don’t think that what they say is actually going to be put into work, so what I’m trying to do is have Google docs and Google forms next year for a variety of things so that students participate more, but then also we need to implement what they want and what they say,” incoming SGA president junior Jacqueline Moss said. “We can’t just let them vote on things and then not do anything about it cause I feel like that’s a reason why a lot of people don’t participate now.”

Moss, as the SGA president for the 2019-2020 school year, has a number of plans to help incorporate more student input into SGA events and thus encourage previously indifferent students into participating. Similarly to Smith and Hultman, Moss also believes that many people choose not to go to events because of their friends.

“I’m gonna try to incorporate more groups of friends into going,” Moss said. “If you don’t have a friend to go with then maybe we can do something where you don’t only sit with your friends, but you have to sit in certain places.”