Amidst the cold first few weeks of the semester, Sandburg’s Student Council has announced its plans for the upcoming Winter Festival to brighten up the school. The Winter Festival is a week of festivities leading up to this year’s Winter Formal, taking place of last year’s Kickback dance. From February 3-7, Sandburg will celebrate with spirit days, lunch vendors, activities, and an assembly, before finally hosting the Winter Formal on Saturday, February 8.

Student Council’s director, Ms. Doe, shared details on the dance. “It’s going to be more formal, so it will be a little bit more like a homecoming dress style than just casual attire, like the kickback was. We’re really trying to just make it like a winter version of homecoming. Maybe a little smaller in scale, because homecoming is so big and we have to do everything inside, but that similar vibe of just bringing that kind of positive energy.
 Everyone’s always so excited during homecoming week and I feel like it brings so much positivity to the school that we want to bring that same idea in February, so that’s our goal.”

The assembly, taking place on the Friday before the formal, is one of the biggest ways that this positive energy is ramping up during the festivities. Students build their own teams of 8-10 people in their grade and participate in spirit activities to compete for a spot in this assembly.

“Last year, we had clubs and advisories to form groups. This year, we’re trying to see how we can open up those groups to kind of mix them up a little bit more. We’re hoping that the activities can be somewhat similar to last year, but, again, mix them up a little bit, just to keep it a little unpredictable,” said Ms. Doe.

This excitement definitely shows through the grand prize of $1000 to the winning group of all assembly competitions, whereas in last year’s Sandburg Fest there were $100 gift cards being raffled off to generate hype for Kickback. In addition to this, Student Council has been making lots of new efforts to try and spread the word on the prizes and details of the Winter Festival.

“We have committee meetings every Thursday. We have an events committee that’s going to meet just to talk about some ideas for themes, see if there’s any themes that stand out, ideas for spirit days, and just kind of start the brainstorming process, and then our exec board also kind of makes some final decisions of themes that they wanna see from all these ideas. We’ll start mapping out what the whole week’s going to look like between the spirit days, any other activities we have, the assembly that we’re gonna have, and we start planning that in December. And then we also have a separate committee that’s going to look at decorations for the dance, and those kinds of little details. That’s the whole thing that will start in December and really finish in January, and be ready to go for February. We have a separate committee that does the marketing stuff, so they’ll be all the posters and online ads that we were able to share,” said Ms. Doe, emphasizing Student Council’s goal to generate more buzz through a wide variety of strategies.

“We put a bunch of stuff on Instagram and social media trying to get people’s attention that way. We’ll have announcements in the announcements, and even messages out to advisories to share with their advisory classes. I think that’s how a lot of people hear about things, at least initially, and then the posters and online stuff kind of helps support it.”

This advertising has taken place throughout the school, with posters sharing information on ticket purchases (on sale for $20 in the Commons), notices on TV screens, drawings on windows, and Instagram posts.

Students are also able to look forward to food vendors during lunch periods, including ChickFilA and Crumbl Cookie. There is also a shortened schedule for the Friday Assembly.

Student Council has posted official spirit week themes on Instagram. Monday was Blizzard Blue Out, Tuesday was Pajama Day, Wednesday was Red Hearts Day, Thursday is Jersey Day, and Friday will be Color Wars.

“I think the activities and the events throughout this week leading up to the dance have been really engaging and super fun to participate in, especially the spirit days,” said Student Council member Rachel Truong. “I think the planning and promoting have been pretty successful. It’s fun to allow more events throughout the school year, especially in the winter as it can get pretty boring.”

All of this extensive marketing and planning did not originate out of nowhere, and the attendance numbers of previous winter dances explain this, with last year’s Kickback only having around 200 students in attendance. In years prior to Kickback, Turnabout was a popular winter dance to go to, but even those attendance numbers started decreasing to less than 1000 each year.

“I think the idea of Turnabout was, I don’t know if intimidating is the right word, but just kind of left some people out. If people felt like they had to ask someone or they had to go with a date or whatever, like with that kind of tradition, I think some people just automatically turned away from it or didn’t even consider it, when really it is just meant to be a fun dance. It’s meant to be like homecoming, something that we can look forward to in the winter when everything is dreary, and have some kind of excitement,” said Ms. Doe. “So we want to just be able to bring as many people in as possible and not have people feel kind of limited by those kinds of traditional parameters.”

As information and excitement about the Winter Festival grows, students are becoming more open minded to the idea of a new winter dance, as the Winter Formal combines both the formal aspect of homecoming and the relaxed concept behind last year’s Kickback. Truong stated, “I think that the winter formal is going to be like homecoming…and I think it’s going to be super chill.”

As Winter Formal approaches this upcoming Saturday, Student Council is happy to see the positive energy of Sandburg students during the festivities and activities of the Winter Festival, and they hope that the dance can kick off second semester with fun and engagement.