By JOHN BUTTERFIELD
Guest Writer

High School is a time of transition and change for most students. It encompasses four years that people spend discovering themselves and learning to interact with one another.

For the freshmen, that experience began the first week of school when they attended the Aloha Rally, and one of the first things our school showed them about being in high school: the Song Team, wearing spandex pants and low-cut shirts.

Then, the music turned on.

Now, as a male student, I see the appeal of the Song Team.

First of all, many students find rallies boring and phony, and the Song Team focuses the attention of at least one gender on the basketball court rather than on causing disturbances.

However, this performance went overboard.

Moves like we saw at the Aloha Rally are not allowed at normal school dances or even in most socially acceptable settings.

This is a high school rally, not the latest music video, and when the Song Team spends most of the routine bent over, while it may illicit catcalls from the audience, it is simply not appropriate.

The first thing the freshman girls and all the young ladies in the audience are seeing at this rally is that to be popular and admired by the school, you have to flaunt your body.

We are teaching the female student population that their biggest asset is how their genetics shaped them and how sexually they can move their limbs.

That is the wrong lesson for a Nationally Recognized Blue Ribbon school.

The female population has more to offer than the amount of skin they can show and still be in dress code.

The vast majority of girls at school move on to higher education, and yet these same girls try out in a fierce competition to be on the Song Team to be taught how to market their bodies.

We should not be encouraging the type of behavior that may lead to problems like depression, eating disorders and men treating women like objects.

The girls on the Song Team clearly are talented dancers.

If their energy were focused on creating a routine that displayed skill in dancing, the song team could be a productive outlet for girls who really enjoy dancing, but the routine at this rally went beyond a display of skill and became downright dirty.

We need to have administrative approval of song team routines with an eye to removing all moves that are explicitly sexual, which would have been almost of all of this rally’s routine.

Our school should recognize that we as a student body and the young women on the Song Team have more to offer than sexually-explicit dance routines.

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