It was the night of Homecoming. All week students from small to tall were awaiting this classically American school dance. Extravagant proposals were happening left and right. People spent hundreds of dollars on dresses, jewelry, and makeup. But when it finally came to the night of the dance, after a chaotic day of frenzy while trying to sell tickets and set up: Homecoming was cancelled.
Before the dance, I asked a grade 12 student what they felt would be the most upsetting thing to happen that night, they replied; "[I would be upset if] the music choice was bad." Little did they know, the falter of this event had nothing to do with the music choice. In fact, we never got to listen to a single song.
FHS has had to deal with the repercussions of COVID since the dawn of 2019. The students in their grad year haven’t had a school dance since ninth grade—which I’m sure they would prefer to forget. Now that restrictions have been lifted, this was supposed to be the school’s first semi-formal dance of the year. The SRC worked hard to rapidly get multiple school events up and running along with the Homecoming, and we all admire that effort.
But still, after everyone had bought their tickets and were shivering in line to get into Hollywood heaven, the power went off. Before even an eighth of the students got to go inside. This was not simply an issue because of the pure volume of wires our DJ had hooked up to our system. According to CBC, the NB Power communications specialist said the outage was “transmission related,” and “affecting approximately 16, 000” across “Hanwell Road, Prospect Street… [and] Lincoln area.”
All of uptown was burnt out. But students were not allowed to stay in the safety of the FHS parking lot. Within five minutes of the announcement, teachers were flooding the student parking lot. Out of concern for safety, teachers were communicating with the students, trying to get them out of the school as soon as possible. While people were trying to coordinate with their parents, siblings, and friends about how to get home, they were cut off and told to leave the property. This led to chaos and confusion, which was perhaps unavoidable.
Nonetheless, the night wasn’t a complete failure. Students still got the chance to enjoy time with their friends, and most people made posts on their Instagram with captions such as “love power outages,” and so on. Most went out to eat or went home to watch a movie. In an interview with a tenth-grade international student, she stated that “even [though] so many unexpected things happened, a lot of students still had a lot of fun and so did I!”
The FHS SRC has made public statements saying that “plans will be sent out soon to re-schedule,” so we can expect to have a homecoming part two soon. Let's hope this event hasn’t been a detriment to our budget so we can continue to have these events. I recommend buying your ticket for the next Homecoming as soon as you’re able so they will have enough numbers to do the dance again. If any opportunities for fundraising or volunteering come about, sign up! We want to allow students to have the best school year, and it is not fair to the SRC to pin it all on them.
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