For the 2016-17 school year the Normal West administration has themed the school year “Strength in Numbers”.

The theme is used to bring a common idea into the school to get students to believe in a similar concept of how the school and people around them should be treated.

“Honestly, I didn’t have a clue what they meant by this at the beginning of the year,” said Morgan Schott (12). “But after the meeting it made sense in how they wanted to bring people to believe in a common thought they were having.”

On the student IDs there is a wildcat symbol with the word ‘respect’ written above it with a small circle with the number 49 incorporated into the design. The idea is for students to believe that the full 49 minutes that they are in class they should be respecting their teachers, fellow classmates, and the time they have been given to learn the material required for the class.

“The first reason we came up with the idea for the theme is to bring the school together, when you have more people believing in something like ‘Strength in Numbers’, it becomes much more powerful,” said Mrs. Angie Codron, Normal West’s new associate principal. “Another thing is to just look at our data. If we are getting referrals what are we getting that for, if we’re having a higher graduation rate what is it and why, it’s more of a way to celebrate high data numbers and focus more on looking at those numbers.”

The theme was introduced to students to see where it can lead throughout the school year and what new ideas it can bring to the table for student events such as college nights, sporting events, or other things related to this, whether it be a club or in a classroom.

“I would like to see how teachers and administration can use numbers to communicate with students like how we use the Respect 49. That was a way to communicate the idea of respecting each other and our time in school,” Mrs. Codron added. “As teachers we have more direction with where we want it to go, but as far as the students I think it will personally be up to what we see in the data when we’re looking at student profiles and what we can revisit with them after the class assemblies and what we can promote through announcements or other kinds of things we do with students that are preorganized.”

Wildcats have been given a lot of freedom with how they would like this theme to play out as the school year gets started.