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The parade cancellation won’t prevent Homecoming violence next year — it teaches the rest of us that school isn’t fair Since when does school spirit mean wanton destruction?
Every year, apparently.
Year after year, class after class, certain students feel that it is their responsibility to ruin the other classes’ Homecoming floats, and each year, the squabble gets worse.
Fed up with this year’s destructive behavior, the administration and several student council members canceled the parade, threatened to cancel the dance, and put next year’s festivities on probation.
All because of the antics of a few overly-spirited students.
It was a minority of kids who misbehaved. Yet, instead of only punishing the students involved, the administration and student council decided to punish everyone, and canceled the parade.
Instead of punishing the guilty parties, they decided to punish the innocent students who had spent long hours planning and creating floats for the festivities.
This logic seems bizarre. If the cancellation of the parade was punishment, who was that punishment intended for? Certainly not the paint ballers and the tire slashers.
The kids who had misbehaved had actually been trying to stop certain floats from entering the parade — and this “punishment” helped them. They stopped not a just few, but all, floats from entering.
Then, school authorities threatened to cancel the dance as well, if any other inappropriate activity occurred. Interestingly there was, no mention of canceling the football game.
What a perfect opportunity for a vindictive student who wasn’t planning on attending dance anyway to ruin the event for everyone else.
During this year’s Homecoming, the policy doesn’t seem to be to punish the troublemaker — it’s to punish the innocent.
The various club floats and the sophomores’ float were fine. Students had worked hard on those floats, but they still weren’t allowed to participate. Even the junior float was fixed; in the end, only the senior float was out of commission.
The parade should have continued, and Homecoming shouldn’t be canceled next year. But until the kids who commit these crimes realize that there are personal consequences to their actions, they are going to disregard the law. If, and when, they are caught, they should be punished. The kids who were known to have participated in creating the messes at the various floats should have been reprimanded. But why punish the victims?
This senior class is graduating (at least, most of us), so it’s up to future classes to behave themselves.
Canceling this parade won’t teach anyone anything, accept how easy it is for a minority of students to spoil things for everyone else.
If Homecoming is to continue as a tradition in the future, kids who are inclined to cause trouble need to realize that there are personal consequences to their actions — not just threats to the innocent majority.
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