Heritage Night is a time where all cultures and ethnicities in the Coppell High School student body come together to celebrate their rich heritage. From ethnic food to cultural performances, the night is a time of honoring one’s roots. 

However, due to the recent flood of college applications, Dec. 4 SAT date and clashing with other school events such as “Men on Boats,” Coppell High School seniors Tanisha Chaudhuri, Ilene Thomas and Naksha Nair took the concern to CHS Principal Laura Springer. 

“[Thomas, Nair] and I went down to Springer’s office and told her ‘here’s a list of five reasons as to why we don’t think it should happen now,’” Chaudhuri said. “Springer was incredibly kind; she let us look through her schedule with her. And so she said the best available time where there was nothing else was Feb. 11. So we got that changed and we let [CHS Junior World Affairs Council sponsor Mashal Khan] and everybody else know and now it has officially changed.” 

One factor for Heritage Night being moved from the Dec. 3 date is many juniors were taking the SAT the following morning.

“A lot of the performers were juniors,” Khan said. “We wanted to give a chance to everyone that wanted to perform to actually do it. [In February], we’re going to have lots of different booths for people to learn information about different parts of their cultures. There will be lots of performances like singing and dancing and there’ll be traditional games set up as well.”

Food was another big factor for moving Heritage Night. 

“We had issues because our food trucks apparently [take] a few months to get approved,” Coppell senior JWAC president Tresa Alex said. “We didn’t have it a few months before for them to get approved. So that would be kind of annoying, if we didn’t get the food trucks we wanted and had to rely on Costco.” 

Chaudhuri and Thomas are emcees for Heritage Night. Though they practiced weeks in advance for the event and had a dance performance planned, they decided to move Heritage Night for the benefit of the school. 

“I was kind of stressed about having to perform for people in like effort for weeks for us to learn dance,” Thomas said. “But now having this extra time allows us to add more songs or add more depth to make it perfect.” 

With Heritage Night moved to February, JWAC is expecting more participation, better food options and an overall higher turnout. Some booths to be expected are henna booths, board games from different cultures and food booths. 

“Since we gave it more time, people should have enough time to do a lot more performances,” Thomas said. “We had to get food trucks approved that we didn’t have enough time to so hopefully we’ll have enough time now we have I think two months to get those approved. We had a fashion show plan and we wanted to figure out how exactly we’re going to do that. And now we have time so we can plan that out.”

No matter when, the focus of Heritage Night still remains inviting those with heritages from all over the world and educating peers about cultures in a fun, entertaining way. If moving Heritage Night means having more celebration, Chaudhuri and JWAC think it’s worth it. 

“One thing for sure that’ll be better is that we’ll have a greater turnout,” Chaudhuri said. “It’s less about the performances, but it’s about people of different cultures and heritages being able to come together and truly celebrate themselves. The fact that a lot of people couldn’t participate or had other things to do made it a lot harder for us to be able to celebrate that. So now that it’s moved, it is going to be better because more people will be able to participate.”

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