It’s 7 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and while most kids haven’t even arrived at school yet, the members of Class Congress are planning the winter pep assembly. When it comes to preparation, Class Congress doesn’t take it lightly; is has a set schedule to follow to make sure that things flow smoothly.

Junior Class Congress adviser Mr. Chad Zwolinski explained how the winter pep assembly began.

“I’ve been running the winter pep assembly for three years,” Mr. Zwolinski said. “I asked Mr. Rowland if it would be okay to have another assembly, so I became in charge of running it, because I really thought we needed to have more than one spirit assembly the whole year.”

Mr. Zwolinski talks about his role.

“I give the responsibility of pretty much everything to Class Congress, so I set up the structure and tell them what won’t work and what will,” Mr. Zwolinski said. “They’re in charge of speaking to teachers, planning what games they want, creating logos, speaking to other Class Congresses, meeting and organizing together, making sure each one of them is in charge of their own jobs. Really it’s their assembly.”

Junior Tziporah Tiller talks about her position as head of Junior Class Congress and what that entails.

“I’m president of Junior Class Congress,” Tiller said. “ [I’m in charge of] delegating people, their positions, making sure everything’s on track and making sure everybody’s doing their job.”

Junior Camiah Tutstone describes her position on Congress and what she’s doing to prepare for the assembly.

“My job is to basically make sure everything is in order as far as helping out our president, Zippy. Just trying to get people excited about our events that we’re having,” Tutstone said. “For the pep assembly, I’m making a playlist and I’m also MCing with Madison Vanderhoof, so it’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Mr. Zwolinski discusses the difficulties of putting the pep assembly together.

“The most difficult part of putting the assembly together is the fact that Class Congress became in charge of it, [and] we don’t have a class,” Mr. Zwolinski said.  “So, to be able to do this all before school and have kids meet you before school and after school and put this together has been a challenge, but it has also been unbelievably rewarding to know that they can put this on on their free time on top of their classes.”

Tutstone finds lack of practice time to be difficult.

“Planning for the pep assembly is hard just because we have to figure out times without having a set run through,” Tutstone said.

Mr. Zwolinski about how he does the best to make sure that the assembly goes as planned.

“The process we go through to make sure everything runs smoothly would be first looking back at previous years, I always keep a list of exact times, exact things that happened, I write down and I keep a little tally of things that went right, things that went wrong, and we always go back and try to adjust what worked well, what didn’t and plan accordingly for next year,” Mr. Zwolinski said. “So having an organized schedule is the most important part.”

Tiller talks about how vital spreading the word is to getting people excited about the assembly.

“I’ve been telling some of my friends about [the pep assembly],” Tiller said. “Soon we’ll start tweeting about it, and just letting people know just by talking to them personally.”

Tutstone is also working on spreading the word to get more people involved.

“For the pep assembly we’ve had to figure out how to get teachers involved as well as make our charity known, and get people involved with that,” Tutstone said. “Because that’s basically the theme.”

Mr. Zwolinski talks about how Class Congress is teaming up with STUGO to spread the word.

“The goal is to start getting that out within the next couple weeks, we’re going to use STUGO more than anybody, because really the charity week is a STUGO event,” Mr. Zwolinski said. “We’re teaming up with them to make it a school wide spirit. So, hopefully we’ll be getting some announcements out, but just spreading it during that entire week.”

Student Council teacher Mrs. Kelly Cusmano discusses the charity that her STUGO kids have chosen for charity week.

“We tried to do a tri-high charity, however Stoney was really passionate about their charity and Adams was really passionate about theirs. It kind of put Rochester in the middle, which made it a little tense,” Mrs. Cusmano said. “We decided all three schools to go their own way, so then we went back to the drawing board and we decide things sometimes by doing NCAA bracket style. We got down to the final four and presented on those, and Project 561 was the last one standing.”

Tustone talks about the difficulties of getting the crowd excited.

“[Getting the crowd pumped is] really tough just because a lot of people are kind of preoccupied,” Tutstone said. “But we’re trying to get more games started, so we’ll be able to have them have a lot of fun.”

Tiller talks about what Class Congress has planned to get the crowd pumped up.

“We have the cheerleaders, and we have the dance team,” Tiller said. ‘They’re going to help pump everybody up to get the energy vibing and flowing.”

Mr. Zwolinski talks about what he hopes to achieve during this year’s assembly.

“For the assembly this year, I hope to improve upon a little bit of the energy throughout the entire thing because we’ve centered it around a sport specifically the past two years,” Mr. Zwolinski said. “We’ve had an introduction in the middle, and it seems that that kind of sometimes has thrown off a little bit of the vibe, to where now it’s gonna be completely centered around charity week, and every single thing will be directly tied back to that charity week.”