Woodside’s annual fall rally was replaced with field day this school year. This decision was made by the Board of Student Affairs (BOSA) as well as leadership teacher Leslie With. This left students confused as to why the change happened as the fall rally was a beloved event.

The fall rally has always been the tradition to start the year, but leadership decided it would be a more effective to kick off the year differently. This change and planning for the project was led by the Aspirations Task Force and administration.

“Feedback from last year’s field day was having it earlier in the year, so that students could really get to know one another,” With said. 

BOSA president Emma Funge agrees that Woodside events have an impact of bringing unity within the community.

“The rallies are unifying and brings everyone together,” Funge said. “We thought that it’d be fun to have people actually interact with each other.”

Field day endorsed activities that could have all different sorts of students involved. There were a variety of activities, including bouncing houses, tug-of-war, fake tattoos, friendship bracelets and water balloons, that offered students an opportunity to build a stronger Woodside community. 

“For the fall rally only a few students were involved and most people were just watching,” BOSA vice president and senior Lily Gustafson said. “But with field day, everybody could like be involved and have fun on the day and just kind of like a community building thing.”

While field day resulted in a large engagement of students, it still led many students to be confused as to the change from the fall rally. Funge explained that instead of starting the year off with the fall rally, our first rally at Woodside will be the Homecoming rally.

“We also thought of having our Homecoming rally being the first rally of the year,” Funge said. “It would be more like homecoming, like we’re all coming together and celebrating being back at school.”