Zombies Brought Spirit Back to Pep Rally

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The high school where I work was looking to find its school spirit. I wanted to get all students involved, but only a handful were active participants. When I was the activities director, I was frequently regaled with stories of past football games, bleachers packed to the hilt with cheering students, faces painted in blue and white. Pep assemblies were held nearly every week and students wouldn’t dream of missing one. I was never sure if these stories were tinted with the amber-colored lenses of nostalgia or if this Hollywood version of high school was accurate. All I knew was that the student body of my time was more racially and economically diverse than the student body of the past and that our school was working to redefine its identity. Somehow that translated to a lack of pep in the rallies.

I have always had a love-hate relationship with pep assemblies.  My leadership students would plan them for weeks, often putting off homework and sleep. They wrote scripts, planned activities and then rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed. On assembly days, I was a nervous wreck. I wanted their hard work to pay off with the enthusiasm of the student body. We were frequently disappointed.

I can admit with hindsight that my leadership students were planning for only a small percentage of our actual students. We stuck to the time-honored tradition of planning pep assemblies to honor athletes and popular students. We wondered why many of our students either sat in the back of the bleachers with headphones plugged in, or opted out of the assemblies altogether.

I’m pleased to say our new activities director is much more savvy than me. She’s discovered the secret to engaging students during assemblies: zombies. She had leadership students ask others in their classes what they would like to see at the next assembly, and it turns out it was zombies. Who knew? Perhaps the fact that it was around Halloween had something to do with it, but being the glass-half-full types that they are, the leadership students ran with it.

It turns out the zombie-themed assembly was the key to bringing students together. Before the assembly, there was a zombie face-painting booth. The activities director had raided the thrift store T-shirt bin to purchase hundreds of shirts that students could “zombie-fy.” The excitement among the student body was palpable.  

Each segment of the assembly tied directly to the zombie theme, and students were awarded for their participation. The big hit, however, was the teacher flash-mob dance to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” It was wonderful to see our diverse and somewhat disjointed student body cheering as one for their teachers.

I hope that we can continue this momentum of bringing students (and staff) together. All it took was listening to students and forgetting, for a moment, that we are Spartans, and coming together as zombies instead. 

Fear is a high school dean of students in Oregon.