Arvada West’s social studies department is intending to win this year’s Halloween costume contest, and has already started polling students with Google Forms as of September 30th to see what costumes students want teachers to wear.
This Halloween, Arvada West High School’s teachers will participate in a costume contest, with students voting for their favorite group costumes and picking between social studies, math, science, English, and other departments. And this year, after not tasting victory in the previous four years of the competition, A-West social studies teachers are planning to win.
Specifically, the social studies department has already sent out Google Forms to students, intent on getting input as to what costumes students would like to see teachers wearing this year, and what type of themes they would vote for.
The idea for the Google Form came from social studies department head Neil Ramirez. Ramirez explains why his group is so passionate about winning, sharing, “I think we’re just passionate about trying to win because we care about the students. We want to impress the students, and we want them to see that we have spirit.”
The initial Google Form gave the social studies department ideas from hundreds of students, allowing them to see what costume ideas are popular and helping them decide what they would need to purchase or create. The department then narrowed down student responses to five choices and sent out a second form, where students would rank the five options.
The top three choices from the second form were “Italian Brain Rot, “Despicable Me, and Founding Fathers, with the last option specifically tied to the social studies department. Overall, Italian brain rot was often picked as the best choice but also selected as the worst option plenty of times. This led the social studies department to go with Despicable Me, as it gathered a higher amount of favorable votes compared to unfavorable ones.
Despite the effort put in by the department, social studies teacher Josh Peterson shares his concerns of the voting process for this years upcoming Halloween contest, stating “…[I hope students] vote for whoever they think is best and not adhere to bribery.” Peterson wants honesty for the votes on who the students believe wore the best costumes, along with students participating and getting involved for this years Halloween season as a whole.
Overall, the entire social studies department is optimistic students will vote for them in this upcoming Halloween contest. In the meantime, they will just have to wait and see if their hard work and research paid off.
