Community’s 2024 Homecoming festivities will feature several notable changes to boost school spirit and student involvement. Those changes include adding a parade, reformatting the annual assembly and organizing new activities during Sept. 9’s week-long celebration.

The modifications result from a collaborative effort between Community’s student class boards and Student Council.

The organizations, Student Council sponsor Mr. Ricky King said, met at the end of last year and brainstormed improvements that would help foster school pride and increase a sense of belonging and community during the annual fall event.

The groups, King said, focused on “ways we could make [Homecoming] better for our school [and] for our students.”

Increasing inclusivity was a key way the organizers felt they could improve the Homecoming experience, and it drove the decision to reintroduce a homecoming parade, a tradition that had been absent for over two decades.

Sept. 13’s Homecoming parade, once a staple of Community’s Homecoming celebration, will be the school’s first in over a decade.

The parade, Freshman Class Board sponsor Mrs. Ashley Durdan-Levy said, will allow for more student groups to participate in homecoming week activities.

Homecoming is “not just the football team or cheerleaders,” Durdan-Levy said, but about the entire school community.

The reintroduction of the parade serves as a way to recognize more of Community’s student body–featuring sports teams, extracurricular groups and various student organizations, the Freshman Class sponsor said. “Anybody can be in the parade from the Normal Community community.”

The parade, King said, will resemble a “much larger version of the parade of champions that we had last year,” King said, “but outside, with the addition of floats, flatbed trucks, convertibles, golf carts…”

By designing, decorating and building floats, Durdan-Levy said, the parade is “something that people can take ownership of.”

Friday’s Homecoming assembly will return indoors for the first time since before COVID and will be split into two sessions to accommodate the student body.

The change, King said, will provide “a more engaging environment.”

While the previous outdoor assemblies, King said, were “a space that house[d] all of us,” they failed to be as entertaining as “being in the gym together in an enclosed space will be.”

Class boards will no longer decorate entire hallways, Durdan-Levy said, instead decorating the entryways to each of the freshmen, sophomore, junior and senior class halls.

The change offers students another opportunity to take ownership of Homecoming hallway decorating through the addition of door decorating.

Having students decorate their classroom doors, Durdan-Levy said, aims to give students the ability to “make school a space that they actually want to be in and a space that they’re really proud of.”

“When kids are little,” Durdan-Levy said, “they talk about ‘going to my school.’ At some point in, we stop saying my school, and it just becomes, ‘Well, I got to go to school.’

“There’s something that breaks down [about] loving and appreciating and really owning” the school experience, Durdan-Levy said. “I want some of that to come back. I want kids to feel like this is their space, and this is something that represents who they are and what we believe in as a community.”

Correction: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Community has not featured a Homecoming parade since moving to the Raab Rd. location in 2003.