New Traditions and a Stronger Community at This Year’s Fall Fair
With the weather getting colder, the homework becoming lengthier, and the deadlines becoming more prominent, school finally feels like it’s in session again. For many students at FA, the fall fair marks the real start of the school year.
Being a senior at Friends, it has become clear to me that it is very important to reinvigorate our school’s fun, exciting traditions in order for them to be passed on to the next grades, creating a long-standing sense of togetherness. A tradition which the senior class started this year is to have a movie night on the first night of fall fair. At 7:30 PM students hurried to the gym, grabbed some candy and popcorn, and settled down to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a movie of our choosing.
As simple as sitting in front of a screen and watching a movie in the school gym sounds, it is something which some students will never forget. Whether it was something funny you and your friends laughed at or a general sense of feeling connected with the high school, these memories made with our peers are irreplaceable.
As much as the FA community is built during school, in my experience, I feel most like a part of the community when we take the time to gather outside of what is required at school. It is when the choice is given to us, whether or not to be around one another, that makes the experience of being together more meaningful.
The building of our community not only happened during the movie, but during sports games as well. Again, the participation in supporting one another just for the sake of school spirit brings an undeniable sense of community and encouragement. The fair is also a chance for students to see how expansive our community actually is. People arrive from all over Long Island and even all over the country, especially if they are students who have graduated and are visiting from college.
Ultimately, the fall fair is what you make of it (big shoutout to those who helped put everything together). The fair represents the consistent, reliable community we have at Friends Academy, and it has yet again shown itself to be a great start to the year.
