By Lee Corey,
Web Editor.
Every year the senior class at Santa Rosa High School paints the senior steps and benches throughout the quad in our school colors as a celebration for making it to their final year of high school. But this year, the senior steps still said “2024” by September.
SRHS principal, Dr. Mark Ryan, explained that he had hoped to improve the look of the senior steps by hiring a company to sand down layers of uneven paint from previous years and apply a coat of black paint before the seniors got to painting them. “I hired a company to do that; they’re the same company that painted our new wellness center, but it takes time,” he said. Because the same company is involved in painting the wellness center and student parking lot, the process has been delayed.
Once he was confronted by disgruntled seniors, Dr. Ryan agreed to let the steps be painted without being sanded first. “The seniors kept bugging me, and so I said go ahead and do it. So the answer is you all can do it, but we’re not sanding it first, which means you’re just going to have to deal with the existing ugliness and try to paint over it as best you can,” he said.
Senior Janelle Wanliss explained the situation with the senior steps from the perspective of a student government officer: “Initially the school said they would be painting over the steps to give us a fresh start, but they never gave us a date on when that would happen. Most seniors began to grow impatient, so the school has now left it up to the senior class to organize a weekend for us to paint the steps ourselves.” Though she explained that Dr. Ryan’s idea to paint over the steps was understandable, “It’s hard to push back something that’s traditionally done in the beginning of the year,” Wanliss said.
The tradition of painting the senior steps is a very important one to many seniors. “As seniors we’ve worked so hard; it’s really nice to walk on campus on the first day of school and see your class number, not just on the senior steps but around campus because you feel proud,” said senior Maya Clark. “For someone who pushes themselves really, really hard academically I was really looking forward to that and just feeling like I was represented at the school and appreciated,” she shared.
It is understandable that our principal wanted to beautify our campus for the 150th anniversary by improving the look of the senior steps, but the long delay in this process indicates a lack of respect for school tradition. Seniors wanted to walk onto their campus on the first day of school, not 2024’s. The lack of communication about the senior steps from both our principal and our student government about what was going on was frustrating and easily avoidable. A simple email about the delays would have cleared up a great deal of confusion and anger within the senior class, and a more agreeable solution could have been found, such as the quad being painted over the summer while we waited for the senior steps to be sanded. Instead, the 150th senior class of Santa Rosa High School has been left feeling disrespected and ignored.
