PHS held its annual winter event Jan. 19 bringing together students for the Winter Tolo. But many students do not know the time and energy that goes into planning these events.  

Leadership teacher Jamie Mooring explains that the biggest challenge is that the venue must be big enough to accommodate the size of the school’s population.

“Since we are such a big school and because our dances tend to have high attendance, there’s only a few places that we can go, that is for homecoming, a winter dance, and prom, so, our options are limited,” Mooring said.  

With more than 1,700 students enrolled at PHS, students are no longer able to have our dances here at the school, unlike other schools. But since the dances are no longer in the school building, the set-up and other struggles have been made easier.  

“Well, the thing is since we go out of building and hire a venue there’s nothing more that we struggle with, we kind of just show up and the dance is set for us, that’s what we pay the venue for and we don’t do decorations,” Mooring said.  

Without the decorations and the dance being ready when they get there, the school has more energy and money to spend on the venue.   

“The budget that used to be spent on decorations is now spent on the venue which is really nice because we don’t have to do any setup, we don’t have to do any cleanup, and it generally feels a little more fancy because you’re not just coming to the school building,” Mooring said.  
 
For the Winter Tolo, ASB Treasurer, Akki Mukkollu was in charge of making sure the contract for the venue was correct and signing off on it. One of the struggles that came up this year was dealing with that contract. 

“We kept getting the contract sent back to us, so we had to keep signing it and sending it back again,” Mukkollu said.  

This was the reason why the tickets were put on sale late. Without being able to confirm the vendor, the advertising and selling of tickets was put on hold.  

“We lost a lot of time on advertising and couldn’t get a lot of people there,” Mukkollu said. 

Since the advertising was late, it was hard to get people’s attention, earning less money off the dance.  
“Fundraising for the dance is basically a fundraiser in and of itself, because the more people we can get, the more money we can make off it,” Mukkollu said. 

According to Mukkollu, this year’s Winter Tolo was a learning opportunity for the future dances in our school.  
“This one was definitely a big learning opportunity because advertising did not go very well, and because advertised so late we weren’t able to get the attention of a lot of people, and if we advertise earlier and are more clear on exactly what our total is, for example, and specifying what the dance is, and I think that we can do better in engaging more students and getting more people [to go to the dances in the future],” Mukkollu said.