There is a new school spirit event debuting at Franklin High School (FHS): Franklin Friday.

Franklin Friday is when students from FHS dress up according to different themes every Friday and compete grade by grade to see what class had the highest participation percentage. The overall winning grade every month gets some kind of special voucher from one of the local business sponsors around town.

To submit their participation, students must take a picture of themselves dressed up in the designated theme and tweet it with  #franklinfriday followed by their graduating year.

The idea for Franklin Fridays came up in a Student Government meeting around January, when Government had a discussion about its identity within the school as a governing body. The Administration told Student Government that it would like them to help improve and build school culture.

Student Government came up with Franklin Friday because a year-round event would be more successful in building school culture than just one or two big spirit events at the beginning and end of the year.

Pantherbook caught up with Mr. Penza, co-adviser of Student Government, to ask him how Franklin Fridays came about and how they are going so far.

“Franklin Friday is a great idea and we have had a good turnout so far,” Penza says. “The biggest problem we have is advertising it to students.”

Since the participation is tallied by percentage of class, we also asked Penza how Student Government was going to count the participation when almost half the Senior class leaves in April for Senior Project. He explained that they would simply subtract those participating Seniors from the class total and use the difference as the percentage denominator.

Penza reports Seniors have won every day so far, showing the best participation troughout the grades. For their most recent win, the Seniors received a voucher for a free breakfast sandwich at Elizabeth’s.The next winners will receive a voucher for The Cake Bar.

“I think it’s a good idea,” says Junior John Siraco. “I don’t know when it started but it seems fun. [The vouchers] are awesome prizes, that’ll definitely get students to do it.”

It is unclear if Student Government is going to continue this event in future years, but so far Franklin Friday has gotten off to a great start with positive feedback from participating students.