“Neon Lights.” 

“The ‘90s.”

“Blacklight.”

These are just a few of the 73 student stag theme submissions that the ASB received before school closure in mid-March in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those who turned them in, however, will never know what the last stag dance theme would have been this month.

For the 2019-2020 school year, the ASB came up with this new method for coming up with the main idea for its finale event, allowing students to suggest ideas to build more traction for it. The student whose theme gets selected gets a free ticket to that stag dance.

“Our main goal is to get student input,” said ASB member junior Jessie Pyo, an ASB co-commissioner who was in charge of overseeing this option. “It’s always just been ASB deciding the theme.”

In October, Pyo attended a School Advisory Council symposium in which representatives from different high schools in the Fullerton Joint Union High School District shared ideas, and this option for coming up with stag themes caught her attention.

“We talked a lot with all the other ASBs and discovered that some schools gave their students many opportunities to have their say in school events, which we thought was pretty cool because we usually plan everything,” Pyo said. “So, we wanted to incorporate that into Sunny Hills as well, and a dance theme was just one of the ways we could do it.”

The ASB did not really require standards for the topics and were mainly looking for serious ideas that are new and rare, ASB co-adviser David Fenstermaker said.

“We’ll take all the applications and then narrow it down to a few,” Fenstermaker said. “If [we find] something unique or new, something we haven’t seen before, something that we think is fresh and exciting, then we’ll turn that over to the [people in charge] to let them decide.”

The ASB posted in February on the Sunny Hills High School home web page a Google Form for students to fill out, but it was taken down after the school closure was announced on March 13.

Pyo said the submissions the ASB received will no longer be used because she does not know if the same method will be used for the stag dances next year.

“I can’t say for sure because this wasn’t an executive decision; [it was] something that my co-commissioner and I decided to do for this dance [in May],”  Pyo said. “The committee we’re in, PTSA, plans both the spring and fall stag dances, but our ASB system doesn’t always guarantee the same people will be in the same committee next year. [The decision] would fall to the planners of the [next] dance.”