Well-rounded and full of passionate students, Wilsonville High School has always represented its students with the utmost respect toward each of their endeavors. With a large collection of communities for athletes, artists, and musically talented students, Wilsonville encourages high levels of both creativity and autonomy when pursuing your passions.

These programs allow dozens of doors to be opened for students, longing to exercise their talents. However, the interactions between these different groups may be limited, and school unification has struggled.

While there are many students participating in multiple programs, cross between these groups is often time consuming and difficult. To support one another, during games, performances, or exhibits, is a challenge for many students, stemming from packed schedules or inadequate advertising.

This is not just present in team or group events either, and is noticed throughout school wide events at Wilsonville, such as Spirit Weeks or our school dances. Student activities have become so overwhelmed by other happenings that many things come and go completely unheard of by the larger population of students.

High school spirit is a staple within both media depicting the “high school experience” and the typical goals of a school, often pushed by both their class leadership and staff. School spirit brings distinct cliques together, allowing them to feel support outside of their typical groups.

The push to bring students together builds a sense of pride within our entire school community, with peers of all ages and groups- some that may even surprise you- cheering one another on and encouraging the pursuit of success, no matter your passion.

Wilsonvilles 2025 Winter Formal and its preceding Spirit Week faced an issue of low student unification. With finals wrapping up right before these events, involvement with these typically exciting events plummeted.

Ticket sales for the dance were at a low, with only 225 being sold, and Chaperone/Wilsonville School Safety and Enforcement Specialist Marcus Washington estimated only around 150 students actually attended.

This reflected the spirit week as well, with minimal participation- unlike our Homecoming spirit week- and an overall lack of enthusiasm towards the fun themes.

Many people showed up to school on the first Monday of Spirit Week completely oblivious to the fact it had begun, and that there was a theme for the day.

 Reagan Meister, a student in Leadership 2 who helped support spirit week by partaking in the themed dressing-up, noted how involvement has been dropping, saying; “People are too lazy, teachers have been doing the most for Spirit Week! We need to help more people enjoy dressing up.”

Hayden Fish, a sophomore, explained how he believes that the root of the issue to unify students for schoolwide and extracurricular activities may be attributed to a lack of advertising for each event, and this is specifically reflected within the Winter Formal dance.

Fish stated, “There weren’t very many people there, but the few people that were there luckily were super energetic. There needs to be more advertising for the dance.” Especially after being overshadowed by exams, it was difficult to properly advertise the dance and encourage more ticket sales.

On the theatre side of the school, musical attendance has flourished during the fall, while viewership seems to struggle throughout winter and spring for the thespian shows. However, as explained by Sophia Culp, this is a pattern throughout each year, and is to be expected.

Culp explains, “Our first play of the year is always a musical, which typically draws a ton of people in. Our last musical Anastasia had two casts, and lots of stage hands.”

“These are always big and wild shows, since musicals are eye-catching and familiar. A lot of people attending know what to expect with the show, since they’ve likely heard about it before. Plus, the large cast size and tech group brings in a ton of family as well.”

Musicals such as this year’s Anastasia and last year’s Elf performance brought in community members from all across the area, while the following plays throughout the year often struggle to bring in a large crowd.

Culp says, “Now we are putting on Radium Girls- a play. It’s a pretty historical play, and since the plays we put on are more obscure, they’re usually less attended.”

“As far as publicity for the shows goes, our drama board does a really good job of getting more things out there, and explaining the plots of our plays to help draw people in. This helps people understand it better, and get them interested in plays like Radium Girls.”

Theatre attendance for Wilsonville has been helped significantly by our new auditorium, and the help of the Oregon Thespians Program in advertising Wilsonville’s plays to the community through social media.

Increasing awareness and understanding of each performance has helped grow the number of attendees, and the school itself has worked to encourage students to appreciate these arts as well, by supporting the theatre group as attending as an audience member.

Wilsonville helped by offering free tickets to students and advertising the plays and musicals over the intercom. 

Culp appreciates this, saying, “I do know people where money was an issue when trying to see a show, so I really do like how the school is offering that. It really does help people attend and get the word out.”

Financial aid and high-levels of advertising have helped encourage students to support one another. For our sports communities, they have had varying student crowds at their games.

In the early season, for example, our boys and girls basketball teams had a slim number of attendees. However, their student fans were incredibly loyal, with a small group of students cheering and supporting at every game they could make it to.

Once the push for state began however, the fans poured in. Significantly more students began showing up, including students Sebastian Zayago-Enciso and Javier Juarez-Pedraza. Together they explained the environment of these games, including the large number of families and students that came to support the athletes.

Explaining the games itself, Zayago-Enciso stated, “Going to the matches was really good. They were fun, and they had a lot of people there cheering.”

Both students agreed that they believe more people came to these games than the state games in years prior, resulting in a loud and exciting gym setting.

Juarez-Pedraza said, “The advertising for the games was really good, every day I was hearing about the games on instagram, the tv’s, during school, we heard about it multiple times before the game started.

All in all, student participation reflects their overall awareness and communal excitement towards an event. Through social media and schoolwide advertising, school spirit and unity can continue to grow and flourish, helping students feel supported by their peers as they pursue their passions and extracurricular endeavors throughout the school year.