The music was booming; students were dressed in dresses, sneakers, heels and dress shirts. On April 17, middle schoolers spent “A Night in New York” at the Twilight Ball. Every year, the eighth grade student council plans the Twilight Ball dance. They spend months preparing and fundraising to ensure students will have a good time.
“Every Thursday we would have a meeting; [at] the beginning, we picked out a theme,” Silas Dronen, ‘30, eighth grade president, said. “At the next meeting, we would pick out decorations, and the next week we would work
on sorting expenses, building decorations; all that stuff.” The Twilight Ball typically has the same theme every year.
This year, however, student council members decided on a new theme: “A Night in New York. Deciding the theme is the first step in any process since the theme is what helps student council members plan the rest of the event.
“I wish we had thought of a theme sooner than we did because then we could have had more time to think through everything,” Nina DeMarcantonio, ‘30, eighth grade vice president, said.
“I liked the process we went through,” Dronen said. “We would select meetings and go little by little, and eventually it would build up to create one big thing.”
The current eighth grade student council is in charge of planning the entire dance; this includes decorating the gym to make it feel more like a dance.
“We concentrate on the decoration aspect for most of it, just like painting posters [and] designing the gym to have the feel we want,” DeMarcantonio said
Student council members have to work together to plan something both seventh and eighth graders will enjoy.
“[My favorite part is] collaborating with all the other people on our student council team and coming up with a theme
and all the decorations and all the benefits we can give the students from our class,” Dronen said.
Along with planning the Twilight Ball, the eighth grade student council also has to fundraise for the event.
“If we had more time, I would definitely do more fund raising,” Dronen said. “We had a few more plans, but we couldn’t pull them out of our sleeves. Because of the canceled pep rally, there were a couple obstacles in our way, but we managed to get through them.”
When the dance finally arrived, Madison Cappel, ‘31, attended the Twilight Ball with her friends. She compared it to the Boogie Bash, a Halloween-themed dance that took place earlier this year.
“I went to the Boogie Bash, [so] I was sort of expecting it to be somewhat like that, but I think it went much better than the Boogie Bash,” Cappel said. “It felt like it was organized a little better.”
It is important to be proud of what was accomplished while taking into account what other students would want in a dance.
“Take into account everyone’s ideas and build off one another and create something that you can be proud of and all of you can feel like you put the work into together,” Dronen said.