Various cheers of victory float throughout the halls and from classroom to classroom as orange wristbands are exchanged from person to person. Across campus, a game takes place, each student competing not only for their own benefit but also for the benefit of the school itself.
On Friday, Sept. 6, the Leader-In-Me club hosted a school-wide Rock-Paper-Scissors tournament, where students throughout the school compete to collect wristbands. The person who won the most wristbands would expect to receive a $50 gift card the following Monday.
“So basically, students get bracelets and teachers get necklaces, and you just go around and play with each other,” junior and LIM Culture President Angel Venable said. “You need five wristbands to play a teacher, and then the teacher and the student with the most wristbands get a reward.”
The idea of this “tournament” originated among the leaders of the club over the summer, when they saw other schools start similar events to solve certain issues within the school.
“Over the summer, me and Jayden Manley went to Orlando, Florida at Jostens Renaissance, and we did breakout sessions, and during one of those breakout sessions we spoke with Little Rock High School, and they told us about the Rock-Paper-Scissors Tournament,” Venable said. “It was just fun for the community to bring the students together and find a way for [them] to bond. We also know that shadow boxing was a big thing at Texas High for a while, and when that happened, our violence was low because people were focused on playing and winning the game, so we’re just trying to reincorporate that again.”
Tournaments like these will take place once a six-weeks, with this implementation striving to lessen overall violence and improve the general atmosphere of Texas High long term.
“We want to create a new form of conflict resolution,” teacher and LIM Culture Sponsor Jordan High said. “What we would love to see is a chance for the whole campus, if we ever see any kind of conflict, that instead of going toward the fists, we go for Rock-Paper-Scissors.”
Many students on campus participating in the event found themselves being more social with people that they otherwise wouldn’t interact with if it weren’t for the event.
“We get to have a lot of fun and be able to socialize [with people] that we’ve never met,” senior Kylie Hanning said. “We’re also not arguing at [all], we’re getting along.”
Curators of the event further had specific goals in mind for the games and the effect that they would have on student-teacher relationships, with this event being a step towards benefitting school culture as a whole.
“If there’s disputes between a teacher and a student, we don’t want them to verbally argue and ruckus,” junior and LIM Culture President Ricardo Luna said. “It’s just kind of a silly way to diffuse the situation, right, and solve it.”
In addition to dismissing student-teacher confrontations, the wristband event served to support inclusivity and student involvement across the entire school to support a greater cause.
“We didn’t want to support division,” teacher and LIM Leadership Sponsor Britni Huggins said. “We want to support a community of inclusion [at Texas High], and so we decided to go school[-wide] with it.”
