Homecoming participation slumps
Back in 2016, 80 freshmen worked on their class float during Homecoming, but by 2023, only a dozen ninth graders showed up to help with theirs.
This is one example of how Homecoming participation has decreased dramatically in the last eight years, a trend which leadership students want to reverse.
“I know that our participation is growing but still not as much as before covid which we need to work on,” said leadership student Brooklyn Barrios.
Numbers fell sharply during the Covid years from 2020 through 2022, and looking at the freshman years of the class of 2026 and class of 2027, they are not growing back to the earlier amount.
Less and less students are participating in the fall dance activities and even the CVHS dance, well known as”homecoming,” ever since the Covid lockdown ended. Events such as the skit, floats and dance have lost numbers of involved students, but why? Is it because CVHS students think that Homecoming is just a leadership thing? Is it because of the hours at school? Many of the leadership students are wondering what happened to school spirit.
During homecoming in the previous years before the pandemic, lots of students would participate in the upbringing of the dance. While in comparison to this year, students have just started to slowly creep back to the original numbers of participation.
“Last year’s seniors went from being freshmen learning how to be in high school, to being seniors and being expected to set the bar of what it’s like to participate in homecoming,” said activities director Thomas Maloney. With the pressure of keeping standards high, it still seems that less students are interested in helping out.
Many students agreed that homecoming is not just a leadership held event. Instead they just feel that homecoming as a whole could be more organized in order to be aware of the activities in advance.
“Leadership did a good job at taking control and getting the floats started, but I see homecoming as more of a community thing because they bring it all together,” said sophomore Gavin Perkins.
CVHS parent Zubin Anary agreed that homecoming is a community event but had a few critiques for the future. “One thing that I would change about the float is the organization, if they had emailed the parents the float plan, things would have been more efficient and we wouldn’t have to think through the plan in real time,” Anary said.
Although there are some changes that could be made to homecoming, the events came together and brought many smiles to many faces.
It is sad that less and less people are participating in the events like dance and homecoming. It is noticeable that the participation is lowering suddenly after COVID and it is highly convincing that there are effects from the pandemic looking on the relationship between the generations and number of people participating. From reading it overall, I think it is a very nice!
I was surprised that the participation for the events was logged over years. I think it’s interesting to see this data and hope that participation can increase more in the future, with the COVID outbreak starting to come with a close.
I think covid is the main reason for the decline in student participation in the homecoming skit. I think most students would agree that the best part of being at school is seeing their friends, so when school becomes fully online people lose their spirit. The first year cvhs was in person again they painted murals instead of doing the floats because covid was still on the rise. I think that after years of inactivity, students loose excitement and spirit for these festivities.
Its cool to see the graph of the homecoming participation rates and I wonder why it goes up and down so much. I think it just mainly depends on the class because certain classes are more into participating. I noticed as years go by it keeps going down, unlike years ago the participation rate was very high.
I think it makes sense that Covid is a partial cause of this because the seniors from the past two years knew what homecoming was actually like, but weren’t able to show it because of certain restrictions. I really hope that participation starts increasing again because Hoco is one of my favorite parts of highschool, and it is a lot more fun when more people participate.
I find it interesting to see how the attendance at events leading up to Homecoming has decreased over the years. Could the reason for the decrease be that some students don’t want to participate or find it interesting enough to devote their time to? I wish we got to hear the opinions of more students, not just students in leadership positions. That might have given more information as to why there has been such a decrease since Covid. Overall, This is a good article. Nice job!
I think it’s really interesting to see how participation in homecoming festivities decrease and figure out what is causing this. The visual charts within the article as well as analysis give the reader the chance to see what’s going on and the quotes give information that is beneficial overall. Nice article 🙂