(this is an archive story, refer to following byline for author name)
By Addison Strybosch
Breast cancer awareness has always been linked to Pink Out and October, yet this year's execution of said theme did not seem to reflect that.
Every year the Pink Out theme is highly anticipated by the student body. Everyone loves dressing up, getting to experience a fun pep rally and watching the game that night. However, the true purpose of Pink Out has always been to spread breast cancer awareness, but not enough students understand the significance of the theme.
“Sometimes it does become more of a color than the cause and I do wish we incorporated more about Breast Cancer Awareness,” STUCO Historian Saray Medina said.
Planning pep rallies is no easy feat and involves a lot of collaboration with many different organizations.
“It’s a collaborative effort. There’s always a cheerleader and my MCs. We make sure to touch base with all the teams, like band and drill to come up with a schedule based on that,” Councelor Beth Sweeney said.
The pep rallies are created by Sweeney, but STUCO comes up with the themes and games at the pep rally. There’s typically a schedule already created for the pep rally that STUCO has to use as a guide, which is how they decide what game to do given the time allotted.
“We wanted something quick but fun and popular. We had seen other schools do musical chairs at their pep rallies and figured we wanted to do that too. We just knew we needed to have all our organizations included,” Medina said.
The student body is very hard to educate during pep rallies. They need performances and engagements at all times in order to stay focused.
“The Breast Cancer Awareness part is hard. Kids in a pep rally setting won’t focus on statistics,” Sweeney said.
In the past when the school had a volleyball coach with breast cancer, they created the pep rally around her and got the volleyball team involved and talked about her struggle with it.
“We’ve had the student body stand up at the pep rally in the past if they had a relative currently living with breast cancer or in remission and it was crazy to see how many students are personally affected by this cancer,” Sweeney said.
Breast Cancer is a much more common cancer than people realize. The student body must be included in the discussion of awareness.
“I would have liked to try and put things into the announcements or something, but we didn’t and I really wish we had it would have been useful,” Medina commented
In the future, STUCO would like to incorporate more information about Breast Cancer Awareness into the pep rally and the week leading up to it. Whether on social media or over the announcements, anything to get the student body to truly grasp that the pink-out theme is much more than a color.