Sure, it’s 90 degrees in November, the Varsity football team is looking for its first win of the abbreviated season, and no alumnus can come home to relive the Thunder life, but that’s okay!! Welcome to Homecoming week – the COVID edition.

“Originally, we were planning to move the Homecoming Dance to the third quarter in hopes that COVID would have calmed down by then, but we realized that we couldn’t keep students waiting for that long, so we decided to go with this hybrid version of HoCo week,” Student Body President Cris Navas said. 

Navas said he can tell students are getting “Zoom fatigue” (even though we use Google Meets). Keeping the DV spirit high is tough, but student leaders want to boost morale on campus.

“We were on a little bit of a time crunch, but we were able to quickly come up with what you see now. It’s not exactly what we wanted (darn COVID), but we’re happy with what we could do,” Navas added.

With the recent revival of interest in the Harry Potter series, the group wanted to feed off of that energy to get students more involved.

“We thought it would be a good way to stir up the competitive spirit by assigning a different house to the different classes and creating that sense of class pride that lacks in the virtual environment,” Navas said.

Senior Lainey Talerico came up with the theme of Hogwarts and took the lead with artwork, decorations, and social media posts. In terms of decorations, the StuCo team was excited to explore creative liberties because of various Harry Potter references like the flying keys, flying letters, house banners, and department names based on actual Hogwarts classes.

“It’s no secret COVID has had emotional and spiritual tolls on us all, so we aimed to conjure the magical element of hope and excitement within students at DV,” Navas said. “In (terms) of everything COVID has taken away from us, there is nothing that can stop us from making the most of the situation and still having a memorable year, especially for our seniors.”

 StuCo leaders have been brainstorming like crazy on ways to keep students involved.

“I won’t lie, it has been difficult,” Navas said. “We are trying to use our social media platforms to keep students involved by asking them to send in pictures for spirit days, give their input and opinions on topics like hybrid learning, teacher of the month, and any ideas they’d like us to try and implement.”

Student leaders hope that it still somewhat feels like Homecoming week even though there’s not the typical football game and dance. 

“That’s why we called A BUNCH of different restaurants to set up discounts for DV students on Friday and Saturday so it still gives students a reason to get all fancy, go have a nice dinner and make the most out of what is available,” Navas said. “Luckily, some pretty high-end restaurants responded and were able to help us out.  We love our student body and we still want and plan on giving them a memorable year!”

The team said they have many ideas in the works, so keep an eye out. Students are encouraged to reach out to anyone on the Student Council.

“We’d love to hear outside ideas!” Navas said.