With only five short months left, it’s fair to say that spirit week planning is in the air.

But is it too early to start? Of course it is!

For some reason, people believe that planning for spirit week at the beginning of the summer is a good idea. This seems a little extreme considering that the airband songs end up getting picked a week before spirit week! Yet I still end up getting a Facebook invite to the “Spirit Week 2015 :)” group. To be fair, a lot can get done during this pre-planning stage, but then there can also be fights, arguing, and division between the grade itself. It often seems like the only thing people figure out during the five months of planning is who their least favorite student is, and that is the opposite of what Spirit Week is supposed to do.

With a summer full of so-called “necessary” meetings, one would think that something as simple as deciding as a hallway theme would not end in grade-wide rifts, but too often it does. Now, I’m not saying that the meetings are entirely useless, but in their current form they cause far more problems than they solve. Personally, I’m not going to take time out of my very precious summer to go to your house just so you can shoot down all of my ideas. If you don’t want them, don’t ask for them!

Spirit Week should be a time for the whole class to come together, everyone working together in the spirit of friendly competition to beat the other grades. Yet it turns out that ironically the fighting within each grade is far more harsh than the competition between the other grades. I believe that every grade should come together at the beginning of year and get all the Spirit Week stuff figured out then, as this will force people to work together to solve problems quickly, rather than leaving many months for needless problems to form. There is no need for everyone to come in on the first day hating each other.

Keep Spirit Week planning in school time!