Walking into school today, many of the usual T-shirts and jeans were swapped out for hawaiian shirts and shorts, with sunscreen, fanny packs and cameras to accessorize. In honor of homecoming week, many students and staff dressed up in accordance with the today’s theme: Tourist Tuesday.

“I like dressing for the beach, and I love travel,” CHS ninth grade registrar Becky Pilgrim said. “I have a lot of touristy clothes, and it’s important to support the school, support the staff, support the students, plus, it’s really fun to be wacky.”

Whether it is showing school spirit or getting creative with different outfits, students and staff decide to dress up for many different reasons.

“There’s a lot of people who dress up around the school, so you make different connections [if] they’re like ‘hey you have as much school spirit as I do, maybe we should hang out sometime,’” CHS junior William Leslie said. “It’s a good community feeling getting those people to actually know who you are.”

In addition to dress up days, a pep rally will be held on Friday in honor of homecoming, as well as a football game Friday night.

“I’m a cheerleader, and I wanted to spread school spirit,” CHS junior Gracie Flynn said. “It’s important to have school spirit because it really brings the [students] together, especially [at] football games when everyone gets really excited.”

Last week, Student Council hung a poster in the main hallway, illustrating the dress up days for homecoming week. Coming back from a four day weekend, however, CHS sophomore Student Council member Shreya Bandopadhyay has not seen as large a turnout in dress up participation compared to last year.

“I haven’t seen a lot of people dressed up; I feel like that’s partially because of the four day weekend, so not a lot of people knew about it,” Bandopadhyay said. “We do have banners by the senior bridge, and people have been walking the halls all day and seen it [so] hopefully, we’ll see better turnouts for the next three days.”

Nonetheless, students and staff are enthusiastic about the week as there are more dress up days to come.

“Homecoming week [dress up] shows school unity and school spirit,” Bandopadhyay said. “It’s not just a grade level thing, it’s something that the entire school does together. Getting people to dress up shows that we all support and want to dress up for the same thing.”

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