Pleasant Valley Elementary (PV) hosted an assembly to kick off their 2024 school year on Oct. 10.
PV’s theme this year is based around football. Because of this they invited high school football players and cheerleaders to join their assembly for Wildly Important Goal (WIG), a new program designed to encourage student attendance. This initiative includes having theme days during the week. The theme days were: Teacher/Student Swap Day, Wear a Hat, Wear your Favorite Jersey and Color Wars.
Kiersten Wasovich, a member of the Lighthouse team to help increase student participation and a first grade teacher at PV, asked the administration for permission to have high school students come to the assembly with the help of first-grade teacher Becki Myers and Principal Teri Ratchford. They originally intended on having only football players and cheerleaders who went to PV be there, but ended up asking others. Rather than administration at PV, the administration had student teachers from Penn State University (PSU) take charge of the assembly.
Matthew McMullen, a PSU student teacher at the assembly, believes in the WIG system.
“The students really get excited about these kinds of things, and they felt the pep. They’re going to come to school every day,” McMullen said. “We don’t get to do them that often, the big pep rallies, but I feel it was very engaging for students. They were really involved, and it means something to them.”
McMullen thinks using a tailgate themed party as the prize for the class with the best attendance will help kids continue to be excited about going to school. The trophy keeps up motivation to see it on their teachers heads at the parade. They also will be getting the themed party if their class wins.
“Students got really excited last year about the duck trophy,” McMullen said. “Now that we have the helmet trophy, they’re going to get really excited over that and want the prize at the end of the month. It was an amazing assembly and put the ‘pep’ in pep rally.”
The teacher who has the class with the best attendance will wear the helmet. The helmet will be worn at a parade. It is made of tin foil and has a paper number on the side. Football player Jamaine Thomas and cheerleader Sophia Feigh believe this will benefit the kids not only with attendance but with teamwork.
Feigh is a community service worker for PV and a cheerleader who helped get the event together. She believes the initiative at school will foster teamwork and motivate students. Motivation can help with not only attendance but also helps kids focus more on school and to be trying the best they can as students.
“It gives them motivation to reach their goals,” Feigh said. “It’s a good idea, and I think it’s a good way to show them how teamwork and attendance are important.”
Thomas believes seeing older students as role models can help keep kids on track and engaged in school.
“The kids in there that play football, they get to see what it’s [like] at a high school level,” Thomas said. “I feel it’s a good example. I know when I was younger, it was always cool seeing the high school guys, and they’re someone you look up to. It’s cool for them to see us and for us to interact with them and play games with them.”
According to Thomas, it’s important to have something for the community and how it helps represent the players and the school as a whole.
“I think it’s good that we got to go in and interact with the community, because I feel football is a big part of the town and it looks good on us when we’re going in and hanging out with the younger kids,” Thomas said. “Just making sure that they’re having fun. It was a big assembly celebration thing, so it makes sense that we went in there, and we played the cornhole with the kids. The cheerleaders got to cheer with them. I just felt it made for a good time. Instead of it just being them with the same familiar teachers every single day, they got new faces to hang out with, and some of the kids that came with us when we used to go to the school too.”
Elementary students also want this to be something they continue to have, as they want to earn the helmet trophy. They seem to enjoy having the older ‘kids’ there.
Fourth graders started the assembly with the importance of teamwork, passing the microphone and each saying one sentence about the importance of working together instead of against each other.
A fourth grader who helped start the assembly is hoping to see this happen again.
“I was having a really fun time,” Alice Arthurs said. “I enjoyed standing up in front of everyone because I [like] facing my fears, one being my stage fright, and it was easy to be doing,”
A. Arthurs puts a new perspective on how the assembly isn’t just about motivation and attendance, but can also be about facing fears or learning new lessons on not only how to treat others, but how to control your own emotions.
Fifth grader Kaleb Arthurs also felt positively about the event. Enjoying the aspect of missing class and enjoying the event as a whole, as he saw his sister standing with the other fourth graders that started off the assembly.
“It made it so math class was very short,” K. Arthurs said. “I would want it to happen again so math is shorter. It was really loud in there, but it was fun.”
