Small Town Homecoming

Last night, Homecoming Week culminated in the Homecoming Football Game in our intimate, old-fashioned, country community. Every year, at Homecoming, I am reminded that the choice my husband and I made in 1991 to move to this town from the city to raise our children was the best decision we ever made. This year, Homecoming was particularly poignant for us since our youngest child will leave home to go to college next fall.

We have only one high school in our town. Each year in October, our little rural community goes all out for our high-schoolers and celebrates Homecoming Week. Parents, school staff, local leaders, and the business community donate time, energy, money, services, and resources to the festivities. Each student class (Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior) selects a theme and a color. The themes are based on things like films, books, fairy tales, or some item in popular culture. For several weeks before Homecoming Week, the students work feverishly and in secret (at a location hidden to the other classes) to design a float, create a huge mural, and put together a class skit based on their theme. The murals are mounted on the walls of the gymnasium on Monday of Homecoming Week, the skits are performed on Friday morning of Homecoming Week, and the floats are the highlight of the parade, which takes place Friday afternoon.

Every day of Homecoming Week has its own activities, games, and a dress-up theme. The four classes compete during the week to earn “spirit points” by showing school spirit at rallies, through creative projects, and by winning contests. For instance, one contest requires a class team to try to be the first to find a jelly bean embedded in a tub of whipped cream and to eat the jelly bean – using only their face and mouth to search for it. Homecoming Week judges are prominent members of the community, like the editor of the local newspaper, the president of a local bank, and the owner of a car dealership. Businesses and private citizens donate money, time, and materials for the contests, floats, skits, and murals. On the Friday of Homecoming Week, the judges select one of the four high-school grade classes to win the coveted “spirit bell” based on spirit points earned. At the end of the evening’s football game, the spirit bell winner is announced and that class gets to ring the bell and to boast that they have the most school spirit.

On the Friday of Homecoming Week, the students gather in the gymnasium to perform their skits. The district had to ban parents from attending the skits simply because of fire regulations. The gymnasium can’t hold as many parents as would want to come. For this reason, they videotape the skits and the PTA sells the videotapes afterward as a fundraiser. At a time when schools around the country struggle to gain parent participation, imagine a school that has to turn parents away at the door.

The students work for several weeks to create their floats on flatbed trucks (the use of the trucks is donated by local businesses). The student floats are not the only ones in the parade. The candidates for Homecoming king and queen ride in the parade in classic cars or on the back of pickup trucks. Horses and other farm animals often appear in the parade, as do rolling advertisements for local businesses, bands performing, and other traveling entertainment.The parade travels a couple of miles from the high school all the way through the main intersection of downtown, past the courthouse, and up to the civic center. Businesses close early as everyone lines the streets to cheer and clap. I usually buy bags of Hershey kisses and throw handfuls onto the floats as they go by for the youngsters to eat. After the parade, the students have a break to eat dinner and soon afterward the junior varsity game takes place, followed by the varsity game, crowning of the Homecoming king and queen, award of the spirit bell, and finally a school dance.

A report in this morning’s newspaper by a local journalist tells how she talked with the coaches from the visiting football team that had the misfortune of playing our football team at the height of Homecoming when our community spirit was bubbling over the top. These visiting coaches watched the parade floats line up in front of the high school, the students dressed in wild costumes climb onto the floats, the music, the pageantry, the small-town spirit, the extravaganza of this event, and they shook their heads in wonder. “We have nothing like this for our kids in our community,” they told her. “In fact, we have never even seen anything like this. This is awesome.”

Several years ago, I drove a van full of cheerleaders and my son (then the school mascot) to a game at a high school in a city much larger than ours. On the drive to this game, my son and the girls described for me in detail the school they were going to play that day. The school, they said, has an amazing football field, brand new equipment, hot uniforms, and all-around top-notch athletics facilities. They described the school’s state-of-the art swimming pool and their country-club-style locker rooms. “But,” the youngsters told me, “even though they have a fancy school, we feel sorry for them because they have no school spirit. We went to their homecoming last year and there were more parents from our team there than from their team – and we were the visitors. They don’t do anything for homecoming. That’s no fun.”

Our J.V. and Varsity football teams both won their Homecoming games last night (school spirit is not always enough for them to win, but this year they did). The stands were so packed that not everyone could find a seat and many of us lost our voices hollering. My son’s senior class won the spirit bell and rang it loud and clear. This community event, Homecoming, shows what is possible when an entire community mobilizes itself to focus on its children by supporting them, teaching them, playing with them, and investing in them. I believe that caring for our children is the most important function of community life. That’s just me. Homecoming gives me the illusion, for just one day, that every child in our community is loved and nourished. Sadly, I know this isn’t true. But for that day every year, I allow myself to imagine.