Shaw Williams

Juniors win Hallway Decorating event.

The annual Hallway Decorating event marks the day when students are divided based on grades and engage in an artistic form of competition against their peers. On the third day of Fall Spirit Week, students stayed after school to showcase their grade pride by revamping the hallways based on assigned grade colors.

The grades would then develop the colors into a theme, and the themes this year were as follows: freshman, Minions (yellow); sophomores, Disney (blue); juniors, Harry Potter (brown); and seniors, Medieval Forest (green). Decorating took place on October 28, and the results were announced on October 30. The juniors won first place, being the first in years to dethrone the seniors. The seniors placed second, the freshmen won third, and the sophomores ranked last.

Like previous years, the winning class was decided by teachers. A form was sent out to all teachers who could choose to vote for their favorite floor. The Reading Initiative Judges judges awarded the juniors with 10,000 points towards the Reading Initiative Challenge due to the fact that they used a book theme to decorate their hallway.

Junior Elvis Chan, Club Liaison of the Student Union, said, “From what I heard from my friends, the awarded points surprised them and boosted their motivation… People have said they will start reporting their reading hours more.”

English teacher and Reading Initiative co-director Brian Sweeney said, “Mrs. Laverde texted me as soon as she saw the junior floor and suggested giving them reading points. We were both impressed with the incredible job the juniors did, but we were particularly impressed with how many elements from the books and films that the students worked into the decorating.” 

With the conclusion of Hallway Decorating, students along with members of the Student Union shared their experiences and opinions on the annual event. 

“I think this year’s theme is good, but I remember doing this theme back in freshman year, so it’s interesting to see a repeat,” said senior Puja Biswas. 

When asked about the theme for her grade, freshman Hannah Wolman said that she thought it was “fun” and “iconic.”

Freshman Olivia Lu said, “I thought the Minions theme was adorable. We had issues receiving the materials, along with the time limit which made things a little worrying, but we pulled through.”

Freshmen-Sophomore Co-Class President Aki Benjamin oversaw freshman hallway decoration and said, “I think that the freshmen theme is good. … I think we have some amazing grade leaders here who are doing a good job and just making sure things are organized.”

Freshmen-Sophomore Co-Class President Jordana Lo was in charge of sophomore hallway decorating and said, “This year’s theme facilitated creativity and teamwork.” Despite the chaos and last-minute decisions, she said, “it was interesting to see what our grade leaders came up with in terms of decoration ideas and nostalgic characters.” 

Students were required to use a limited $200 budget to their advantage in unique ways to decorate the entirety of their floor.

Junior and Student Union Senate Chair Natalie Tamma said, “See, for the Harry Potter theme we decided to use pages from books that we already have to make the paper-decorations. I think that’s a pretty creative way to save our budget.”

Junior Sinthiya Saika said, “As juniors, we learned a lot from the mistakes we made during previous years such as not planning things out beforehand. We handmade the majority of the decorations with paper and coloring supplies. We have some great artists in our grade who helped out with decor as well. Alongside that, we just ordered some materials like balloons and strings off of Amazon.”

Similarly, the freshmen also “DIY-ed” their decorations. Olivia said, “We used old cardboard which we traced out to make minions.”

“I thought the budget was higher than it actually was,” said senior president Ethan Ben-David. Despite the seniors’ ability to pull their theme together in the end, he stated that “there wasn’t really a process when planning for the floor.”

In terms of the collaboration in her group, sophomore Victoria Ng said, “Everyone’s getting along very nicely, very cohesive, we all have our own roles but we all still work together greatly, so the teamwork is immaculate.”

Updated to reflect that the juniors’ color was brown and not red as originally written.