The change of the Turnabout into an informal post basketball game dance has caused a lot of controversy. While some PV students support the decision, others have decided to fight back.
Senior Lauren Groenenboom created an official petition to restore Turnabout dance. Groenenboom, like many other students, was upset that the dance had been turned into a casual affair that is scheduled to take place after a basketball game.
To see what her fellow students thought about the decision, she released a poll on her Twitter page in which she asked whether students liked the new format or wanted the old dance back for Turnabout. Of the 360 people who participated in her poll, 83% of the voters were in favor of reinstating the old dance.
It was the message that was present in the results of her poll that prompted her to make a change. “[The poll] really encouraged me to put a lot of work into the speech and get people to rally behind the topic in hope of making a change,” Groenenboom states. The speech that she refers to is a speech for public speaking in which she discussed why the old format should be brought back.
As Groenenboom states, she did this in order to get fellow students to rally behind her petition. After discussing with Mike Zimmer, she put paper copies of a petition to bring back the former dance in teachers’ classrooms for students to sign. Zimmer stated he is “willing to support whatever the students want to do.”
For this reason, Groenenboom is striving to get between 700 and 750 students to sign the petition in order to prove that reverting the dance to its original form is what the majority of students want. Only after approximately a week of the petition being released, it has already received 371 signatures.
Groenenboom is not the only student who has done something to enact a change on this issue. Sophomore Courtney Mohr has also created a petition on her twitter account. Mohr has also discussed her petition with Zimmer and Katie Buchter, the teacher sponsor of the social committee.
With a little more time, the benchmark that Groenenboom wished to achieve may very well be reached, and other petitions like Mohr’s could continue to grow and garner more signatures. Thus, the work of some students may prompt the dance to be changed back to the formal event that it once was.
