By: Roberto Ruiz, Opinion Reporter

World Journalism Preparatory School has a major problem with school spirit. Ask a student from here, and they’ll joke about it being bad, even if their statements are irony tinged. While other schools are respected community establishments, our school is typically the butt of the joke at best and disparaged mercilessly at worst by outsiders.

The biggest problem WJPS has is we have no established symbols or traditions. It’s easy to rally around the Bayside Commodores or the Francis Lewis Patriots. However, we don’t have any serious mascot to support and plans of last year to make a mascot never came to fruition.

Even if we did have one, we wouldn’t have any teams to place it under. We barely have enough students to form one. It’s odd to most people that our students must play under the Francis Lewis banner, but we’ve gradually accepted this as just part of the WJPS experience. Can we really rally around that?

Here’s the kicker: We do have a mascot. The Wolverines. Isn’t it so incredibly telling that while we have a mascot since many don’t know. Ultimately, this is indicative of a fundamental issue: the students are as apathetic as the staff. The average student doesn’t know the Wolverines exists. I didn’t know the Wolverines exist.

We can talk about school spirit all we want, but talk is cheap and it’s time for us to be given something to support, and for us to be ready to support it. Ultimately, to fix this, we need to put in action last year’s plan of making a mascot, and we need to do things to cultivate a school spirit that don’t come off as half-hearted. We need to get students involved in more programs and display our school with something other than a Latin quote in the stairwells or a banner telling us to watch The Highlight. Ultimately, just try. Everyone, try harder because current attempts have done very little to cultivate school spirit.