After a year apart because of the pandemic, this year’s Spirit Week focused on bringing us together as a school.

The biggest changes to the week eliminated a lot of the class-against-class competition and focused on student unity.
Spirit Week kicked off with Class Color Day and Powderpuff, and each grade showed their class pride by dressing up in white, red, blue, or green. The themed days continued throughout the week, ending with Black and Gold Day and the Homecoming football game.
In other years, the last day of the week had been Class Color Day, but this year, we came together as a school and showed our pride for John Carroll.
Before this year, the pep rally competitions were broken up by class, but this year, we cheered for groups from all the grade levels as we watched various games in which one fall sports team competed against another fall team.
The Quiz Bowl, previously a class-based competition, showcased the skills of the JC Academic Team as they faced off against the faculty.
All of these changes seem small, but what they really did was to create a sense of school spirit and brought us together as one student body rather than four separated age groups.
When the pandemic shut down the school, interaction with other students was mostly limited to just the people in our own classes who we saw on Teams calls. Sports, clubs, advisories, and even just passing people in the hallways and saying “hi” was unavailable, and so we spent a year isolating ourselves by grade.
Turning the class competitions into places to rally together as a school helped to bring back the John Carroll Patriot pride and make or remake friendships with people outside of our academic classes.