Junior Luke Rucker stands on the football field as students from the stadium look down on him. MCing the pep rally, he feeds off the energy of the crowd. Luke Rucker and a few of his friends decided to get involved in improving the pep rallies.

“We’ve noticed at Har-Ber we just really have a tough time getting people excited about pep rallies,” Rucker said.

He then went to cheer Coach Jamie Bunting, who plans pep rallies, to see what he could do. They brainstormed ways to get students excited about pep rallies to change the negative and boring reputation that pep rallies have born in the past.

“We’re just trying a bunch of new stuff. Just trying to put our ear to the ground to see what we can do to get kids more involved,” debate and forensics teacher Joel Brown said.

Along with Bunting, Brown and student council sponsor Rachel Claire Cockrell, help plan the pep rallies. Their goal is to find what will get kids more involved. One way they plan on doing that is by letting kids help plan the pep rallies.

“Kids are always open to complain, but finding kids who are willing to do something is the harder part,” Brown said.

Finding the students who actually wanted to help out was harder than the teachers thought it would be.

“Kids don’t know all the rules,” Brown said. “We can’t let them be in charge of every single thing that happens and what we do.”

There are no rules in place that students cannot plan pep rallies, but Brown is afraid the students will not always make appropriate decisions.

“We want the students to have fun and be involved,” Bunting said.

The teachers want students to be involved the whole time. Bunting thinks changing the location will help that.

“In the last pep rally, we let kids make a lot of the decisions,” Brown said. “Letting kids go to the cafeteria who didn’t want to be there [at the pep rally].”

According to Bunting, if students are not comfortable with a pep rally environment or would rather not go, they may go to the cafeteria instead.

“I’m part of the T.V. program so we could show videos during pep rallies, like a hype video, that’d be really cool,” senior Nick Luttrell said.

Luttrell thought a hype video would be fun and it would help excite the students involved.

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