Student Government forced to cancel annual events

Chapel Hill’s annual Tigerfest celebration was canceled this year because of scheduling conflicts with end-of-year tests in the month of May.

In place of the event, the Chapel Hill High School Student Government will host Fun Friday, an extended 79-minute lunch period that will occur on March 18, the Friday of a delayed opening week.

Class President Joyce Yao expressed disappointment that Student Government will not be able to host Tigerfest, but hopes that Fun Friday will make up for the loss.

“Tigerfest has been a beloved Chapel Hill tradition since 1969, and to not be able to put on such a momentous event really broke our hearts,” Yao said. “We still want to bring the excitement of Tigerfest to the students in some form, so we came up with Fun Friday.”

Features planned for Fun Friday include performances in the amphitheater; a pie-eating competition; carnival games; stalls handing out cotton candy, popcorn and snow cones and a photo booth.

Senior Shreyas Pyati has attended Tigerfest for the past three years, and was surprised and upset to hear about the cancellation.

“I don’t think you can fit that much into a lunch period, so I think that it won’t be as good as the previous years,” Pyati said.

Student Government also had to cancel the Winter Formal dance this year due to a scheduling mishap by the venue where it was to be held.

The Chapel Hill Student Government had booked the Chapel Hill nonprofit venue Extraordinary Ventures for January 30.

Yao received an email from the venue on January 11 saying that the event center was actually already booked for the date of the dance, and that they felt “very badly that [they] thought this date was available when it was not.”

Student Government decided to search for a replacement date rather than cancel the dance immediately.

“We didn’t want to disappoint anyone,” Yao said. “People were excited for it, which made us really hesitant to just call it off.”

Student Government officers tried to find a replacement venue, contacting seven different locations, in an effort to reschedule for a date between February and March. Eventually, Student Government decided that the dance could not be organized.

Winter Formal is traditionally the only dance that freshmen can attend, which means that they will not be able to go to a formal dance this year.

Yao did, however, note the positive side of the cancellations: planning needed for Winter Formal can be redirected into organizing other events. She added that student government has invested its time in several other ideas in place of the cancelled events.

“The cancellation of a couple of our special events forced us to think outside the box, and we’ve come up with a few awesome events,” Yao said. “So far we’ve amped up the random acts of kindness efforts at the school and have become more involved in community activities, such as the CHCCS dance marathon.”

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