On December 5th, there was a Truly Titan meeting in the Room 107 to discuss changes concerning the future of events such as Powderpuff and Partnership Night. 11 teachers, 3 administrators, and one parent was there.

While SCA is in charge of powderpuff, and supposed to represent the entire study body, not one officer or representative from SCA was there.

Those in attendance had many new ideas to change the current system of powderpuff at Dominion. While powderpuff is a huge tradition that will most likely not be leaving Dominion within the next year, there were many suggestions to improve the current event of powderpuff that is already in place.

While the powderpuff game did not happen during homecoming week this year due to difficulties with the new field, all agreed that the powderpuff game should be during homecoming week in the future, as previously to this year, was done. A popular suggestion was that the game should be played at night instead of during a school day and for a longer period of time. It was also suggested that the game could be before the Varsity football homecoming game, as another way to increase attendance and excitement for the game. In addition, the game would not interrupt the school day.

Another identified problem for powderpuff is that only half of the school is involved, as the game is Juniors vs Seniors. Instead of just limiting the excitement to two grade levels, it was suggested that other clubs and student organizations at Dominion could get involved during the game, by having activities or other events on the sideline.

There were also a couple of suggestions to revamp and change up the idea of powderpuff entirely. Ideas included events like a Varsity Volleyball game during the school day for the whole school to attend. Another idea was the have the powderpuff game to be transferred from a flag football game to a basketball game, similar to the faculty vs student game which used to be a Dominion staple, it could be changed into a Juniors vs Seniors basketball game.

It was also suggested that powderpuff could possibly be allocated to another club or student organization at the school to take over the event from SCA. This has been done at other schools, where organizations like DECA have taken over organizing the powderpuff game, allowing more students to get involved with the event.

Partnership Night was also a point of discussion at the meeting as there were many concerns about the productivity of the event. It seems like some major changes will be coming to Partnership Night as there were mostly complaints and only a few positives brought up at the meeting. The attendance has been declining within the last couple of years, thus securing the idea that major changes are needed.

As far as what these changes could be, many possibilities were discussed. These possibilities included having teacher/parent/student conferences instead, in which the students’ families would be invited by the teachers. One big problem of Partnership Night was that the wrong audience was attending, as parents whose students were having a lot of success were showing up and the parents of the students whose students were struggling were not. Having teachers invite the parents of the students who are struggling allows Partnership Night to reach the audience who needs it the most.

Many other issues were brought up concerning the amount of time that each parent is allowed to talk to a teacher, with the limit being three minutes. It was discussed to increase this number so that the teacher could make meaningful connections with the parents and have more effective conversations. The three minutes also created an unnecessary barrier between the teachers and parents. Teachers also disliked the location of the gym as it didn’t allow for a lot of privacy between conversations. Some teachers also pressed the concern of feeling uncomfortable having conversations with parents alone.

Training teachers to have those hard conversations with parents on the phone and face-to-face was also discussed, as this would allow the idea of having parent/teacher conferences to be more possible, as teachers would have the correct training to be able to successfully get through those tough situations.

The future of Zero-day was also mentioned a bit with the idea of having freshman and transfer students and their families as the only people who are invited to attend that event. Rather than have the whole student body, who already know the school, show up to Zero-day.

The next Truly Titan meeting will be February 6th.