The Warsaw High School Times

Edited by Marine Rambault

Graphic by Sonia Bajorek

Partially based on a true story

Are you planning a social event for your school? For your year, or the whole of IB? Be it a Studniówka, a Prom or a dance – if you need help on the next step in your journey, then this article is for you.

The first step is obvious – you need to form a team. This is key, unless you are a one-person army, you need a concise team of capable and dedicated individuals. Within or close to said team, you will probably require a teacher or member of staff (depending on the school) to give you some executive power and provide advice. You will want this teacher to potentially assist with planning meetings and supervision of the event, though that may depend on the functioning of the school, and for instance also helping with the provision of chaperones. That’s what you want, now let us see what can go wrong. 

Depending on how the school works, a certain situation may occur, and, in fact, has occured in the past. Picture this: start of the year you reach out and get a wide yet concise team willing to do what it takes. You get the teacher, but then this is where things get complicated. Said teacher decides to start delaying meetings or making the team wider, causing miscommunications, and jobs being done twice (or not at all). Unfortunately, there is not much you can do about it. You are forced to comply

The second step in planning a prom is the general logistics. You need the date and venue, which is quite obvious, and you require them with haste so as to ensure the place remains available. For this, you will need to procure the date with the least alternative events coinciding, since being a school event you will need teachers and supervisors or chaperones, and you will want the students to actually attend the event. You need to make sure that you can get your venue quickly, since if it goes, you’re back to square one with even less time. You also need to secure the date, which can require a talk with senior management. This needs to be done quickly, but completely, otherwise you can run into the issue of having to change the date, despite having already shared it.

The third step is the specific logistics and marketing. This is the long section in which you and your team decide upon the minutiae, which is what varies an unforgettable event from its disappointing counterpart. It is crucial to overlook nothing and manage the budget for this section with the utmost precision to keep all in order. In addition to this, event marketing is key, and can be easily done through posters, word of mouth or even having social media pages.

Therefore, one must also plan for a budget miss-calculation. This can either mean you have some leftover cash (which you can donate to charity or something of its nature), or you can end up in debt, which is not what you want. However, serious mistakes like these are highly unlikely, especially with weekly meetings and proper planning.

In fact, sometimes raising more money than necessary for a prom may be quite a good thing. Students of one school have had to grapple with the issue of senior leadership being not fully certain as to whether a certain prom should exist, and have decided to make it so that a portion of the proceeds from the tickets goes to charity. This has had a great effect of not only boosting the legitimacy of the event, but also making the school’s leadership agree more to the prom committee hosting various events in school to promote and raise funds for their endeavor.

The final step is the coordination for the night. This is possibly the most important, and needs to be done well and have planned for everything to go wrong. Otherwise, imagine, a pupil standing silently on a stage, forced to recite an imaginary speech to all their peers. A truly terrifying experience.

Now, not all of these may apply to you and your school. If you have administrative power as a student body and a pre-selected group, then you can skip some steps (same as if you have your event at the school). The main takeaway, however, is that you must prepare for all eventualities, or else you are asking for trouble!