Haunted House – SGA Event

The Secondary Student Government Association (SGA) held its first event of the school year which was the Halloween haunted house on Friday 1st November and Monday the 4th of November. Being a grade representative this year in the SGA, I was involved in the decision makings, helping out the group with decorations and being inside the haunted house scaring the people away!

Halloween is not celebrated by the secondary students in our school. So, we decided to do something for Halloween as we didn’t want the Halloween spirit to be completely dead again this year. The first thing that we decided to do was that just a few days before Halloween, we would post posters all around the school and the daily bulletin to remind everyone to dress up for Halloween to at least have that Halloween spirit going on and that really worked as almost every student came dressed up compared to last year where I only spotted maybe two or three people dressed up during Halloween. So yes, that was a success.

But, we wanted to do something more than just informing people to dress up. The group wanted to have some sort of an event on Halloween to make it more fun and also to make some funds for future SGA events coming up. So, Anya who is the spirit leader came up with the idea of having a haunted house on Halloween. Almost everyone in the group agreed with this idea and thought it would be a good fundraiser. So, we decided to push through with this event. One of the first things to decide was the location. For something like the haunted house, we needed a big room. The first location we decided upon was the auditorium but had to cancel it out immediately as we realized that it would be occupied for the primary production rehearsals. Another option was the Blackbox (theatre room) suggested by Ms. Mcquillan. This would have been a good location to do the event as its a dark room. But we decided that it would be a very small space to work with. Finally, we decided to do it in the PMPR as its a pretty big room and wasn’t reserved for any kind of event.

One of our main goal with this event was that we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this as it was a fundraiser and we have other events coming up this year which will cost us a lot. So, we kept a very tight budget and moved ahead with this project. Working with a small budget was difficult. We needed decorations, candies and a bunch of other things. But since the budget was tight we tried to work with things we had in our school and at our homes. Such as decorations, which we mostly made and gathered from the Art room which had skeletons and other items. To get some more decorations, most of us in the SGA pitched in whatever Halloween decorations we had at home. So, the only thing we spend our money on was getting the candies.

The setup was very simple. We bought in some bulletin board available in school and made walls out of it. We also used black curtains on the windows to block out the light. We had a shortage in the black curtains and decided to use garbage bags to cover up the rest. While there was still a bit of light coming from outside, it wasn’t that bad to ruin the event. We began to put together these things in the days leading to the event.

Everyone in the SGA was in charge of some responsibility during this event. Some people were in the front door giving out tickets. There were around 4-5 people inside the haunted house to scare people and I was guarding the back door for a while and later went inside the haunted house to scare. The ticket prices for this event were 200 rupees for an adult and 100 rupees for kids. Most of the people coming through the door were primary kids which was our target audience for the event. There were barely any high schoolers who came to the haunted house and there were a few middle schoolers. At the end of our first day, we made around 13,000 rupees which was great. Then, we were given a chance to do it again on Monday since most of the primary kids had left school around the time our event started and so Monday we had the opportunity to do the event from 9 to 10 which was during the primary school recess. The event was a huge success and we earned a total of around 26,000 rupees.

This post addresses outcomes:-  LO1 Identify own strengths and develop areas for growth: Students are able to see themselves as individuals with various abilities and skills, of which some are
more developed than others and LO3 Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience : Students can articulate the stages from conceiving an idea to executing a plan for a CAS experience or
series of CAS experiences. This may be accomplished in collaboration with other participants. Students may show their knowledge and awareness by building on previous experience, or by launching a new
idea or process and LO5 Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively: Students are able to identify, demonstrate and critically discuss the benefits and challenges of
collaboration gained through CAS experiences.