It’s that time of year again: Homecoming spirit week! As the highly anticipated week arrives, you can find the students of Lewis Mills High School tie-dying shirts for color wars, digging through their closets to find pink apparel, and even rushing to find someone to be their twin. The first spirit week of the school year is always the highlight of the fall semester here at Mills.

“I like America day because it’s new and I think that it could be really fun,” says senior Anna Schatz. “I think the spirit days this year are better than they have been in previous years.”

While some students have criticized the repetition of the spirit days from year to year, student council vice-president, Paige Reid has another way of looking at the repetition.

“We decided as a group to repeat some of the days because they have been so built up in the past and students really seem to participate. We also have to worry about homecoming right after spirit week so it’s kind of a lot of stress for the group, so we try to make it easy on ourselves by just re-filtering the days,” Vice President Paige Reid says. “People still get involved anyways. They like them, they do them, so we keep them.”

Another long-awaited event during spirit week is the infamous pep rally on Friday. The four grades go head to head in a variety of activities such as musical chairs and the LSM-famous dodge ball game.

“As much as seniors should win everything, you can’t just make them win. The dodge ball game has to be legit and you can’t just make them win cause’ they’re seniors, and this is coming from a senior,” football player Casey Ciemniewski says about the dodge ball game. “If the juniors win fair and square then they win, I’m not gonna’ pretend that we won.”

The excitement during the week all builds up to the final event: the homecoming dance. This year’s masquerade theme is something that Lewis Mills has never done before. Student council vice president, Paige Reid says that student council will be selling masks this week and that each grade will get a different color mask.

Paige adds, “We’re bringing back the photo booth this year because we saw how much people liked that last year and we want to get as many people to come as possible.”

When I asked Paige if she thinks this year’s spirit week will be a success she said, “All of the seniors, juniors and sophomores are going to get involved so we just have to get the freshmen to step it up and get involved too. If everyone participates then it will be a great and memorable week.”