December rolls around and while the students are stressed with finals, the student council (STUCO) cheers up the students and faculty around Greeley West by giving them a fun scavenger hunt featuring everyone in the school. The yearly tradition of looking for your designated snowflake dates back all the way to 1987 making this year the 36th edition of it.
The tradition consists of getting everyone a specific snowflake with their name. The snowflakes are then taped up all around the school where students and faculty are then free to look and scavenge for their snowflakes.
It’s not just STUCO that has to carry the load. Luckily Social Studies teacher and Student Council Advisor Lea Sanford was able to get multiple clubs and classes to help with the making of snowflakes.
“The art department, front office, Mexican American Studies, and NHS (National Honors Society) all were able to get together and help with the cutting and gluing of snowflakes,” Sanford explained.” The heavy lift for STUCO is writing down all the names and color coding the papers.”
With a project this big it could be assumed that there were hardships. In this case, it had to be the not-so-pretty snowflakes that periodically were “left behind.” Sophonmore STUCO member Diana Kudu says that she had to sacrifice a lot of poor snowflakes that experienced the chopping block.
“I thought the ugly ones really hindered us. I personally had to throw away a lot because they weren’t pretty enough to be hung up around the school,” Kudu said.
Junior STUCO member Annalyn Parker was a pioneer on the organization portion of the snowflakes saying she helped decide that the snowflakes should be color coded.
“It was mine and Aaron’s idea to make it easier to find everyone’s respective snowflake,” Parker said. ”So we went ahead and decided to color code the grades to make it easier on the 2000+ humans here at the school.”
The tradition truly brings a winter wonderland feeling to the Spartan community, which is good since it distracts the students before and while they take their finals these last days in December. Hopefully this can foreshadow as well a white and snowy Christmas so it can truly be a story-like ending to the first semester at Greeley West.
