Wednesday, March 17, seniors Maddie Shanholtz, Nathan Brown, junior Brigid Banks and other SCA members created a video tour of HHS for the rising freshmen. Their main idea behind the video was to make sure the rising freshmen could get comfortable with what is going to be their new school.

“Since the [pandemic started], the students who are new to the school haven’t had a chance to really get in the school and understand the format [of the school] and [get] comfortable with what was going to be their new surroundings, so SCA really wanted to try and provide them with that. The main idea behind wanting to do that video was just [to help] the new Blue Streaks get a sense of their new environment,” Shanholtz said. 

According to Banks, organizing the tour was not very complicated. The most challenging part was working with everyone’s schedules to see when the SCA members could go into the school to film. 

“I feel like it was relatively easy. We had the help of our SCA leader, Ms. Delozier, and also the help of Ms. Brino, [who is] one of the counselors, and they both helped us organize going into the school and safely filming all of this. I feel like the most complicated part was trying to work with everyone’s schedules because, obviously, we all have extracurriculars… We had to work around that, so it was kind of hard to get everything filmed on time, but it was a really fun experience, and we worked it out in the end,” Banks said. 

Similarly to Banks, Shanholtz felt the most challenging part of filming the video was seeing when people could go into the school and film. They had to make sure that school staff was present at the school while filming. 

 “I think [the biggest challenge was] just having everyone check with their schedules because everyone’s been busy lately, so we just wanted to make sure [that] everyone would have a chance to come [into the school] and film. [Another complication was]  making sure that people in the school [such as] admin and counselors would be there [and] that there wouldn’t be too many people in the school at once,” Shanholtz said. 

Brown thought it would have been nice to have people in the school talking in the video so the rising freshman would have been able to see more people. However, this wasn’t possible because of COVID restrictions. 

“It would have been cool to get some more people in it talking just so the kids would have gotten a chance to see more people, but obviously that’s not really a thing we can do right now. It would have just been cool for them to meet some more people in the video,” Brown said. 

If Banks were a rising freshman at Harrisonburg High School, she thinks that she would benefit from the tour. The SCA tried to get specific with the locations in the school to give students a better idea of what happens there.   

“We really tried to dive in really deep about each section of the school so that you get a better idea and it wouldn’t just be like, ‘Oh, here’s the cafeteria;’ you would actually get to learn about what happens there or which hallways lead to which classrooms, and I think we even talked about the numbers [of certain classrooms and subjects]. I think we touched on that so that it would really help them be able to learn about the school,” Banks said.