Students of all grades could benefit from being more involved with the creation and design process of parking passes and Homecoming shirts. I believe that driving around with a parking pass that I had a hand in creating or wearing a shirt that one of my classmates designed would make me feel more connected to the BSM community. Decreasing school spirit has become an issue in the last few years at BSM, and a few adjustments to increase connections within the student body could be a potential solution.
Jerry Pettinger has the responsibility of ordering parking passes for each school year, and he was able to explain the process of ordering parking passes. A company outside of BSM picks the parking pass designs. “We even let them do the design work knowing that our school colors are red and white,” Pettinger said.
It could be possible for him to send the company a specific design that was created by students, though it would likely have to be chosen the year prior. I hope that in the future I can put up my parking pass with the knowledge that one of my peers made the design.
As a student council advisor, Mike Johnston was able to give me some insight into what Homecoming planning looks like. Student Council has control over the homecoming shirt designs, and they all work together over the summer to pitch designs and vote on what they prefer. Designing homecoming shirts brings some challenges due to how early homecoming lands in the school year. “It’s tricky with homecoming, because that happens right [after the school year starts], and we have to order the shirts like in August and…we keep it to student council, but then we usually get a good submission from that group,” Johnston said.
Johnston agreed that it could be possible for more students to submit or vote on designs the school year prior, so shirts could still be ordered on time. He liked the idea of picking designs from a larger pool of submissions but believed it would be more difficult to do so.
After seeing the design for this year, I think that sophomore representative Ellie Porisch knocked it out of the park. To celebrate BSM’s 50th year, the Homecoming shirts have a special embellishment on the sleeve. “Freshman to juniors have red[with a white design], and the seniors wanted something a little different so we did the inverse,” Johnston said.
The student-made design for homecoming shirts looks great, and parking passes designed by students is a change I am hopeful that administrators can implement to further increase connections within BSM’s community.