Jackson Mountford, Reporter
@jmount_courant
With the holidays behind us, the Student Coalition has their minds clear after much planning regarding the Christmas-themed Spirit Week.
Stu-Co introduced a new holiday spirit week as a fun and collective experience that brings the school together. “Spirit Week is enjoyable because it’s an excellent way for the whole school to come together. We’ve implemented a lot of new Spirit Days for this upcoming week before the holidays,” Junior Class President Drew Bench said. “One of the more interesting days that our class is in charge of is Ski Day, where you dress up as if you’re going to go skiing.”
For the student body presidents, hours of planning and preparation went into creating the winter Spirit Week. “A few weeks before the Spirit Week, we look at the Spirit Days that we did last year and we vote on which ones that we thought were successful,” Drew said.
In addition, Stu-Co gets in touch with administrators to help with the marketing side of promoting Spirit Week. “We email Ms. Cognetta, who runs the announcements and ask her to put it on them,” Drew said. “We also make posters and then we hang them up at the school.”
Secondly, every year a charity drive is organized per grade level, and the seniors will organize a fundraiser to help single mothers at Malta House in Norwalk. This is just one of the four examples of charity that is organized by Stu-Co in order to give back in a creative “grade-involving” way. “We’ll be volunteering and fundraising for a local home for young mothers called ‘Malta House,’” Senior Class President Robbie Hellmann said. “I hope this experience helping in the community will be fun and gratifying for students.”
As an example of a “school-wide” charity, this year, Stu-Co completed a charity drive called, ‘Toys for Tots.’ “I am most excited for this year’s charity, Toys for Tots. We organized all of the gifts for underprivileged children. We ended up raising over $1,100 and with that money we were able to purchase and then distribute the Christmas gifts for the kids in need,” Robbie said.
All-in-all, an important factor of Stu-Co is creating a close-knit community and environment where everyone feels included. Through events like spirit weeks and charity drives, Stu-Co manages to pull school spirit together. “Community is key at NCHS; as Stu-Co representatives, we try to create opportunities for participation, like Spirit Week or Homecoming,” Student Coalition sophomore President Susanna Rittenberry said.
