Our school had its first pep rally on Aug 16. The new seating has seniors and freshmen on the home side and juniors and sophomores on the visitor side. The pep rally seating makes no sense. Upperclassmen should sit on the home side and underclassmen should sit on the visitor side.

During pep rallies, all performers and speakers face the home side of the gym. This means that the people sitting on the visitor side usually see the backs of heads and not faces. Students that are currently seniors had sit on the visitor side for two years, while incoming freshman immediately get the best seats in the gym. It is not fair to the upperclassmen who are sitting on the visitor side right now. Getting to sit on the home side should be a privilege, which the upperclassmen have earned. 

Currently, the senior class is the smallest class in the school, and the underclassmen sizes have been steadily increasing since the school has opened. The staff say that class size is the reason the seating is  done this way. It makes sense that there would not be a lot of room for the underclassmen to sit on the visitor side, however there is never enough room for students in the gym in general. With class sizes getting bigger each year, pretty soon there won’t be enough seats for the entire school to sit in the gym, and changes will have to be made to accommodate this. 

Alternatively, if the seating situation stays the same, then the direction in which people face during pep rallies should change. If seating is not based on grade level, then there’s no reason for the performers to only face one direction. It’s called the visitor side, but those are still students who are being forced to attend a pep rally just to look at the backs of heads.