In recent years, Roseville High School has seen a decrease in student participation in the homecoming court nomination system. The system has been in place for years and is now seeing the lowest amount of students participating since it’s implementation. According to activities director Brent Mattix, this decline is due to a variety of reasons.
“Roseville’s been proud to host a variety of courts through many years, going back almost to the beginning of our inception as a school. What we’ve seen in the last four or five years, since COVID really coming back from covid, is that we’ve just seen less and less participation for the nomination process and then surprisingly there’s a number of students that have been nominated who communicate with us that they’re not interested in being on the court,” Mattix said, “It’s something that we’ve been having conversations within talking tigers. We have students who are saying yeah we still want to keep this tradition but actions speak louder than words so if we don’t see that student process involvement then that’s something that we really need to look at and identify as a culture for the school, do we want to continue that or look in a different direction.”
To combat this decline, the student government has sent out forms to gauge how interested Roseville High School students are with the current court system. According to Dance Committee chair Shaywa Safi, the majority of the students at Roseville are still interested in maintaining the tradition.
“So Mr. Mattix and I created a form to send out to all the students and they have to fill out a survey to see how many people actually cared about court. If more people didn’t care about court than didn’t care about it then we were gonna cancel it but more than half of them said that they liked it and actually care about it. We decided we really just had to promote it a lot and try to get as many nominees as we can,” Safi said.
If students decide that they are no longer interested in the court system, then a replacement would have to be created. Safi believes a change or removal of the current court system would affect numerous established traditions.
“If we didn’t end up getting enough nominees then we were gonna have to cancel court and that would’ve shifted a lot of things for the parade as well because the winners of the freshmen, sophomore, and juniors would have to ride in the cars. Luckily, we ended up getting more nominees. Not as much as we hoped but we got enough to get it back on track so it’s a green light,” Safi said.
Although this year’s homecoming court is continuing as planned, Mattix is preparing for the future of the court system, and Roseville High School activities as a whole.
“We’re still not sure where we are if it’s students don’t know enough about the processes that we have or about the activities, if we need to have better communication because, well let’s just face it, there’s a lot of distractions that this generation has especially with social media and so many things going on outside of the school,” Mattix said, “There could just be a little bit of pollution where the message isn’t getting through. It could also be that their interests are in a different area and if it is, we want to identify where that is so we can tailor events and activities to best excite students again to get involved at Roseville.”
