On March 4, Manitou Springs High School hosted its annual Mustang Strong Day. Mustang Strong Day has been an ongoing tradition within the school and has gone under many names but has always had the same central purpose as a “mental health day,” where students choose from a variety of activities to participate in for that day. Courses varied from games, to life skills, book reading to a drum circle. This year, however, Mustang Strong Day was reshaped and reformed.
This year, Mustang Strong Day was shifted from a mental health day to more of a community service day, bringing about several large-scale changes. Students were assigned to a single activity or field trip with the goal of community service, be that weed pulling or crafting toys for animals at the Humane Society.
These changes were met with a variety of feedback. Mackinzy Wall (12) feels the changes were beneficial for the school and the community. “I think it was a good way to be involved with our community,” Wall said. “The day used to be a more mental health day, and now it’s kind of turned into a community service day, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.”
She sees the changes as beneficial on a larger scale than just the school. “We are building a stronger community through having this day; so overall, I think it is a better transition from previous years, since it does give the school a good look because we are helping the community while also taking a break from school,” Wall said,
Other students did not much prefer the day to previous years, however. Rhiley Todos (10) saw value in the day but preferred what it had been in years prior. “I personally didn’t like it a lot, even though I feel our community definitely needed it,” Todos said. “I didn’t like it because we had to pick up sticks and rocks for one of the activities, but it was fun to get out of the building.”
Students who were either freshmen or new to the district, and had never known Mustang Strong Day as it was before, found the day to be really fun and a good break from school. Nicholas Engracia (9) had fun participating in the day’s activities. “I think it was really fun. I got to be in a really cool group that did the petting zoo activity,” Engracia said. “I think it was a really cool experience to get to be up close with these animals.”
Being a freshman, he had not had an experience exactly like this before. “I’ve never had a similar experience, so I think this was really cool,” Engracia said. “It wasn’t just field trips, but they offered a bunch of opportunities and activities that my last school couldn’t do.”
Regardless of how students felt about the new day, all enjoyed the day more than they thought they would. “I ended up enjoying the day more than I thought I would, just because I had a lot of my friends in the group that I was in, so I got to hang out with them outside of school,” Todos said.
Even students who liked the changes shared the same sentiment. “I heard a lot of opinions about it. They liked it, they liked going outside. They liked helping animals. They liked cleaning up the trails in Manitou and stuff,” Wall said.
Faculty at the school who were in charge of organizing Mustang Strong Day found the new schedule to be more work intensive for them.
Jill McCracken, a teacher at MSHS, had more work put on her because activities were outsourced to third party organizations. “Teachers last year did a lot of the organization themselves. So when they picked what they wanted to teach students, they designed it themselves,” McCracken said. “This year, Mr. Housley and I did most of the designing and we orchestrated all the field trips and all the crafts and things like that. It was a lot more work on Mr. Housley and myself than in years past.”
Because of the changes, many students chose to skip the day and be called out. Some students had to stay because they couldn’t be called out or their sports or activities required them to attend the day. AJ Maestas (10) was one such student who took the day off due to simple lack of interest. “Nothing on the list of activities appealed to me. I had originally forgotten to sign up, and so I got placed in a random group, and so I just decided I’d be better off staying home,” Maestas said. “It was a good concept, but it could have been advertised in a different way, or made more appealing to students because it wasn’t very appealing.”
Whatever the reason for so many absences, the organizers of Mustang Strong Day plan to fix the issue for next year. “We’re going to meet in a few weeks and reflect on the attendance rate, trying to figure out what we can do differently to improve it for next year,” McCracken said. “Maybe we didn’t do a very good job of explaining the purpose of community service and why we wanted to make that change.”
