Thursday, February 20, 2014

Day 100 - Reflections of MWHSPride after 100 days!

Today's post is from senior MWHSPride Co-Chairman Courtney Simonson

“Pride: Moments of pride are the stories that you cherish. Often these moments start in high school...when your football team won the homecoming game, when your dance team advanced to state, or when you made it on the podium at International DECA. These are the moments in life when you think back and you're proud of your high school experience.” This will be our opening statement when we present our Public Relations project at DECA State next weekend. We are proud of this project, but we are more proud of how the MWHS students and the community have reacted and responded to this campaign. We can’t believe that we made it to day 100!! It’s been a bumpy road at times, but we knew that we had a community that would step up, and help us make this project thrive!

We are proud of the fact that this Public Relations campaign has inspired other sports and activities to increase pride at their own events. Both the boys’ and the girls’ basketball teams created a “golden ticket” program that granted an MWHS student free admission into any home game. The large student section at home games promoted pride and encouraged teams to play their best. This campaign not only altered the attitudes of students and the community, it also inspired many other sports and activities to start their own Twitter accounts. At Mound Westonka it became the norm to have a Twitter account for any extracurricular activity. It was amazing to see individual sport/activity Twitter pages including the #MWHSPride hashtag.

Overall, we feel that the campaign has been a success and has received a large amount of positive feedback from students, staff members, and community members. For example, we received an email from a guidance counselor after a student wrote an appreciation post dedicated to her. She said that, “it had brought her to tears and reminded her why she had chosen to work at Mound Westonka.” Signs of appreciation like this have motivated us to keep working hard throughout the campaign.

In the beginning of the campaign we were nervous about whether the #MWHSPride hashtag would catch on within the student body. We found that the number of tweets during football games completely exceeded our expectations. People would expect that during a pride campaign, a lot of tweets about pride would be tweeted during football games, but considering out team’s losing record the tweets were unexpected. Mound Westonka students still found things to celebrate, even if were down by 50. This truly indicated how positively the campaign affected our student body.

This blog – “170 Days of MWHS Pride” also got the community involved. Many parents have made reading the blog a part of their day, and requested to write a blog post without any prompting from our team. Every week it has been a challenge to find a new blogger for all 170 days, so this positive response made the challenge of finding bloggers a little easier.

When Alex and I began the MWHS Pride PR Campaign, we knew it would entail a lot of hard work throughout the entire year. In order to connect with students, we had to reach out to them in a way they were familiar with – social media. This was a tough project to get started, but once it was started, it became one of the most rewarding experiences for everyone involved. The key to this project was not only to promote MWHS Pride, but to live and feel MWHS Pride
!

Courtney and Alex

If you have a story that you would like to share, please email mwhspride@277apps.org for more information! We would love to hear from you!

Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Day 99 - Pride in my Spanish Class

Today's post is from 8th grader Thomas Rohr

Coming into Spanish as an 8th grader, I thought I would struggle because I didn’t know any Spanish. I started out cruising by not learning much but when the test came I struggled because I didn’t know the material. By the end the quarter, Mr. Bormann, my Spanish teacher, had me stay after school to study with him. 


Eventually, I was doing better on tests. Spanish then became easy and I got my grade up. I managed to do well in Spanish by the end of the quarter! Going into the second quarter, I was a lot more confident about the course content. Even though the Spanish was a lot harder 2nd quarter, I managed to handle it quite well. I actually had an A all quarter and I did well on the semester finals. I was so happy with my Spanish grade. I really want to improve my Spanish and become fluent. I have Mrs. Atkinson this quarter I hope she is as nice and helpful as Mr. Bormann.  I'm sure she will be.

Mr. Bormann & Thomas

If you have a story that you would like to share, please email mwhspride@277apps.org for more information! We would love to hear from you!

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Day 98 - Cross Country Pride

Today's post is from sophomore Meghan Matt

When I think about my cross country team I think about my second family. Thinking back I don’t know why I joined the team but I can safely say that it was the best decision I’ve ever made. I started the summer going into 7th grade and was immediately welcomed by the team on my first day. I remember walking into the room on the first day and being extremely intimidated by the giant seniors and upperclassman. Kyle Peterson shook my hand and Krista Humbert showed me where to sit and made sure I found my way during that first day.

I just finished my 4th cross country season and was elected captain for next year as a junior. It still amazes me how I love it as much as I did the first day. I hear all of my friends complain about going to their sports and activities after school and I feel so lucky that I look forward to going to practice and being with the team every day. The team is my favorite part about the sport. Everybody is so excited to be there and makes doing the hill intervals on 102 degree summer days fun. Coach Humbert says that our team has a "No jerk rule", meaning quite literally, if you're a jerk we don't want you on the team. I not only learn more and improve on my fitness, but I also become a better person. Coach Humbert is always lecturing us on some kind of life skill or another and it's really cool being able to grow as an individual not only athletically but also personally.

One of my favorite parts of the season is our two night training trip in St. Cloud. As a reward for our hard summer training, and a break before the school year starts, our team spends time together exercising, eating, playing volleyball, swimming, cliff jumping at the Quarries and running. This trip brings the team together and is definitely one of the highlights of my year. Being on the cross country team has helped me to expand the people I socialize with, become more active and fit, and has helped me to become more comfortable with who I am. Having such a positive and accepting place to go to is something I feel really lucky to have found.


Claire, Lilly, Kenzie, Meghan, Addie, Veronica and Hannah

If you have a story that you would like to share, please email mwhspride@277apps.org for more information! We would love to hear from you!