Pleasant Valley High School has always had high expectations when it comes to the student hunger drive. Last year, Pleasant Valley ranked number one for the most cans brought in to support the student hunger drive. In order to encourage students to bring in cans, the Spartan Assembly team must come up with fun ways to motivate students. For an ongoing tradition of four years, Spartan Assembly has put on Dancing with the Studs.
Dancing with the Studs is when about five or six couples post a video of them dancing on Twitter and the amount of retweets and likes they get count as votes. Also, in the main hallway they have their own boxes where students can put cans into whichever box they want according to who they want to vote for. Lastly, at the assembly the couples perform in front of the school and they also get scored on how loud the crowd cheers for them.
According to Natalie Murphy, leader of Dancing with the Studs, “The stud couples are supposed to encourage their friends to bring cans to the boxes in the hallway because it is part of their score, and it’s a fun way to kick off the student hunger drive”. This event is supposed to be a fun way to bring in cans but as many students have already heard, it has raised some conflict.
The females who were asked to perform are Caroline Carlson, Haley Moore, Amy Showers, Kayla Stevens, and Allie Zucker–who are the five seniors on the Platinum dance team. The dancers were to choose a stud as a partner, but were asked to avoid choosing a football player since they had recently danced with the cheerleaders at the Homecoming assembly. This was upsetting to many students, especially the cheerleaders and football players.
Murphy addressed this issue by stating, “When we started planning Dancing with the Studs, we contacted the five Platinum seniors. After Dancing with the Studs videos were tweeted out, a student expressed their disappointment that cheerleaders and football players weren’t participating in the event. We reached out to Platinum members and non-football athletes first because they just performed a dance together at the Homecoming assembly. Spartan Assembly’s goal was to include more than just athletes as the studs. We never had the intention to exclude any group.”
Many students thought that this issue was merely just leaving the cheerleaders and football players out when really it was an honest misunderstanding. Barb Pischke, head of Spartan Assembly, stated “I’ll be honest, the issue had nothing to do with the dancers. I think the issue was from what I understand that the cheerleaders and football players felt left out due to it was a misunderstanding of what traditions were.”
There were various ways this issue could be solved and Spartan Assembly decided it was best to bring the students in and discuss it face to face. Pischke stated, “When we saw the tweet and heard ongoing conversations, I asked the person who sent the tweet as well as the girl who made a comment about it in class to meet with us during eighth hour so we could listen to their concerns”. Spartan Assembly then discussed a resolution to promote more participation.
After all of these complications, many students now wonder if Dancing with the Studs will continue next year. Murphy answered this question by stating, “It’s uncertain at this point. We want this to be a fun positive event to support the student hunger drive. That is something that will be discussed with next years Spartan Assembly”.
Due to the level of extent this process has gotten to, students are now beginning to realize that the importance is on the hunger drive and not who gets to dance for dancing with the studs. It was merely a fun way to kick off the school year with some hunger drive competition.
