On April 4, Jackson-Reed’s SGA hosted a spring fling dance in an attempt to establish a new school tradition and increase school spirit.
“We know the year is long and difficult a lot of the time so SGA’s biggest goal is to try and create fun events that bring the community together as well as give us the opportunity to fund other important SGA events and traditions,” said senior SGA secretary Sydney Mabry.
SGA attempted to host a spring fling a couple years ago but the event was deemed unsuccessful. “We aimed to use the things that we learned the first time as building blocks for this year’s dance,” Mabry said.
191 students attended the dance. This predominantly consisted of underclassmen, with 46 percent of attendees being freshmen and 30 percent being sophomores. Contrarily, only 33 juniors (17 percent of total attendees) and 13 seniors (seven percent of total attendees) attended.
“One of the biggest reasons we wanted to have a spring fling was to give the underclassmen another thing to be excited about,” said Mabry.
Sophomore Isabella Mara Ornstein said that she wanted to go because, “they don’t have dances like this in Spain, where I’m from, and I knew a lot of my friends were going.” She said that even though “the dance was not what we expected and we ended up leaving early, I enjoyed taking pictures and hanging out with my friends.”
However, SGA struggled to reach their target number of purchased tickets. While initially tickets cost $10, in order to reach their goal they eventually made tickets $5 for people who participated in spirit week and distributed numerous $1 coupons to underclassmen.
“While it did take a little bit of finesse, we did end up selling our target number of tickets,” Mabry said.
Junior Sage Deora, who attended the dance with her exchange student, said that “it’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy, if people say they aren’t going to show up, their friends won’t show up, and so on.”
SGA also hosted a flower fundraiser and planned spirit week in conjunction with spring fling. “Something fun about dances is that we get to also have a spirit week and fun events leading up to it,” said SGA vice president Francesca Krevat. “In this specific case we were able to have the flowers that people bought and make the school feel festive,” she added.
The goal is to make spring fling an annual event. “We’ll take input from students on how we can do it differently and more successfully,” said Krevat.
Mara said that “the idea for the dance was great despite the problems and I hope next year it will be better.”
“We’ve spent the whole year trying to create traditions and things that people can look forward to year after year. We want to change the narrative around dances and really encourage people to get involved in our school community,” said Mabry. •
