2007-10-20 Halloween

Elementary school Halloween parties have been an American tradition for decades, yet in recent years many District 204 schools have banished Halloween celebrations entirely or moved them outside of school hours.

There are much bigger issues facing the district but this one became a really hot topic last school year.

Until this year, each elementary principal could make their own decision about classroom parties. Over the years these have ranged from the traditional holiday parties, to curriculum themed parties, season or alternately themed parties, to no parties at all.

Over time we lost both Halloween and Valentine's Day classroom parties at Brooks. Last year our classroom parties included a fall party in September instead of Halloween and an Earth Day party in April instead of a February Valentine's party. I’ve heard there are a small number of students whose families do not want them to participate in a Halloween celebration at school, therefore in the spirit of inclusion it was decided that there would be no Halloween parade and party at school. This seems wrong to me. In an effort to avoid offending a few, the many lose out on this opportunity. Halloween for the majority of American families is a traditional secular and fun celebration for children.

Last October Brooks held its first evening family Halloween party. Hundreds of families showed up, which both indicated the level of interest in celebrating Halloween at school, and turned out to be way more people than could be accommodated comfortably. I truly appreciate the efforts of the volunteers who put on the party. There was simply no way around having extremely long lines for all activities and huge crowds in every part of the available space. This was not an enjoyable evening.

I much prefer the classroom costume parties over this chaos. In a classroom party my daughter would have the chance to see her own classmates in costume and every child would have the opportunity to do each activity provided by the room parents.

A few creative room parents have made the best of the situation since we've lost out on the usual themes. Last year we had a New Year's Party and a Seventies party.

The school board received a lot of feedback from parents about this and it seems that the majority prefer Halloween parties during the school day. A new policy was written and put into place in June that requires the principal and parents to agree on room parties.

Principals are choosing to handle this in different ways. While the wording of the new policy would indicate we be given a choice of various options along with the reasoning behind them, this is not what I’ve seen. The two letters I’ve seen that went home to families stated what parties would be offered and when, and parents were to send back a Yes or No. The Brooks party list is an evening Halloween party in October to be held at the middle school, a winter party in December, a Valentine’s party in February (awesome!), and Earth Day party in spring. We were not given options or reasoning behind the options and the survey was clearly set up to lead to a certain outcome.

The evening Halloween party conflicts with a concert that Waubonsie Valley and Granger students will be participating in, and there are certainly other conflicts as well, meaning that not all students who would like to celebrate Halloween with the other students at Brooks will have the chance to do so.

At least one school no longer has daytime classroom parties at all, after having first replaced the traditional parties with curriculum based parties. The principal does not intend to reinstate the daytime parties even with the new policy in place. What is the point of this? Childhood goes by so quickly, and an hour and a half of lost instruction time to have fun three times a year does not seem unreasonable.

It’s sad that for many of today’s grade-schoolers Halloween will always be just a regular day of school.