During the final week of October, Harrisities participated in the school’s annual Spirit Week. Many Spirit Week traditions remained intact this year, such as the THHS Apparel Day, Hall Decorating, Pajama Day, and Twin Day, raising excitement throughout the student body.

Participation throughout Spirit Week was strongly encouraged, as the eventful week was treated as a competition between the grades. Each person’s participation in Spirit Day activities contributed one point towards the entirety of their grade’s point pool, with the goal of claiming victory over the other grades.

Hall Decorating was a particularly memorable part of the Spirit Week competition, with students of each grade adorning their lockers and walls with banners, posters and streamers of their grade’s color and theme. Coordinator of Student Activities Sarah Oberlander, who oversaw Spirit Week said, “there were a couple categories that contributed to the overall winner such as ‘Overall Appearance,’ ‘Overall Use of Color,’ and ‘Overall Use of Theme.’ Faculty members score each floor and return their score cards to me and we total that score up. The students with the lowest scores won because we ranked them from one to four.”

Junior Class President Sherin Shibu commented on Spirit Week saying, “We do Spirit Week to raise spirit and morale and to get people involved and because of that we do the Pep Rally, [and] we do grade-unifying events such as Hall Decorating.”

She also commented on the work that went into the decorating. “This year, Hall Decorating required a huge amount of effort,” she said. “Last year, the juniors didn’t do so well on the job; we actually placed last but this year, we wanted to rise beyond that so we actually started to prepare over the summer. As you can see, grades really get competitive over these things.”

With this, the juniors–whose orange colored streamers were visible throughout every inch of the fourth floor– celebrated a first place victory this year. The seniors, whose incorporation of the Peter Pan theme placed them first in the “Overall Appearance” category, scored second this year.

This year’s Spirit Week was also tied to a cause- donating money to charities was a big part of the competition between the grades. Large water jugs were placed in the front of the school and points were given to the grades for change placed in the bottles. At the same time, points were taken away for bills placed in the bottles. This encouraged students to sabotage other grades for the purpose of supporting a good cause.

Additionally, Spirit Week staples such as the Pep Rally continued. “I thought the Pep Rally was great and honestly really cool,” said freshman Rabia Khan. “I loved how passionate all the teams were… they killed it.”