A couple of weekends ago Lakewood High School hosted its 2024-2025 Homecoming dance. With the theme of Night in the Stars I was expecting bold and glamour, but as soon as I walked into the gymnasium that night, I was immediately disappointed.
Initially I was upset with the display furniture from the library, sad-looking banners over the walls of the gymnasium, red carpets and balloons. Then as the dance progressed, when my friends and I got tired from dancing, it was revealed that there was a cap on snacks and drinks. Each student could only get two drinks per ticket with a few snacks of their choice, including water. This cap on drinks and snacks was by far and away the biggest outrage of the event, especially considering the tickets 40$ price point. Your essentially paying 40$ for 2 snacks and 2 drinks in terms of food.
Homecoming King Xaiver Terrell also agreed that the pricing could have been different.
“Obviously, they had to spend money on decorations and the food, but 40 dollars was a little too much for everything that was going on,” Terrell said.
On top of that, the music wasn’t to my personal liking. While I was expecting most of the songs to be like “Party in the USA” and “California Girls”, I was met with raunchy music from Sexy Redd and NBA Young Boy that lead to me feeling like there was no variety.
Compared to the previous year’s homecoming this one did not compare. I was expecting my experience to be as enjoyable as the other ones; good music, places to sit and unlimited food and drinks.
“There were a lot of hiccups,” SGA Advisor Destiny Waiters said.
While homecoming this year was far from optimal in my eyes there is good reason for that. Homecoming was heavily rushed because of the unexpected disturbances of Hurricane Milton and Helene causing more of a salvaged attempt at Homecoming rather than a proper one.
“It was hard with the hurricane because we had to keep rescheduling everything,” Senior class treasure Jada Merek said.
Waiters and Merek explained that after the storms it was difficult to find another DJ since the initial one was booked, and it was difficult to find a person for the 360 camera.
I will note that despite this year’s homecoming experience not being my favorite, the 360-camera feature was the best out of any of the years. There were fun props to use in your shots which I appreciated the option of.
“This was a very new experience for me,” Waiters explains.
This was Waiters first year being an advisor of SGA, so there were a lot of new things for her to learn.
She did explain how she also wasn’t given the most time to plan homecoming to begin with, so both her and the SGA were all on a time crunch.
Given the circumstances I would say they did the best they could with the time they had and I’m glad homecoming still happened despite all the diversity it faced.
While I didn’t have the best time plenty of other students did, “I was able to see friends that I haven’t seen in a while,” Junior Maggie Monfreda said.
Homecoming is a great opportunity to have a night out with all your friends, especially to lighten the mood after stressful weeks.
However despite my qualms, I’d rather prefer this attempted Homecoming then to not have one at all and I do think its good that the school offered a Homecoming to the students who thought they might not have one.
