While students and staff celebrate the fun of Spirit Week and school pride, have you ever wondered how Spirit Week started in the first place? Here’s the history of why this week of dress-up is so important to schools and communities.
Dating back to the early 1950’s at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, California, the school introduced a week called Friendship Week. This week was intended for students to get closer to one another and strengthen the school’s community. Friendship Week called for different grades to wear certain colors during the week. Throughout the 1950s, Friendship Week also started at different times of the year. For example, one year it could start in August while in another year it could start in December.
Unsurprisingly, many students didn’t participate in Friendship Week as this newly introduced week was unfamiliar and unexciting to students. To encourage more student participation in Friendship Week, specific dress-up days were added. According to the Campanile, Palo Alto High School’s publication website, these dress-up days gave Friendship Week more popularity and student interest.

The Campanile states, “There was not much participation from Paly’s… until 1955, when junior boys dressed up as sophisticated gentlemen, sophomore boys dressed up as the gentlemen of tomorrow, senior girls dressed as old ladies and freshmen girls dressed as little girls.”

Seeing how well these dress-up days encouraged students to get involved with Friendship Week, this tradition continued with more specific days such as Class Color Day or Generations Day. The success of Friendship Week showed how dressing up could be a great way to show school spirit and welcome back students to the new school year. Because of this, Friendship Week was renamed Spirit Week and moved to the beginning of the year in the 1960s.

Spirit Week became widespread as more schools wanted ways to connect and show pride in their community. At our school, our Spirit Week days are Orange Shirt Day, Beach Day, Pajama Day, Color Wars, and Blue and Gold. This shows how despite this tradition starting decades ago, the festivities and fun never really change.

Spirit Week is important because it’s able to connect every student with one word: pride. Spirit Week shows that we are proud of our community, schools, and everything involved within them. All students have their differences but Spirit Week is a way to show how even wearing a simple flower lei or silly pajamas allows for everyone at Mount Pleasant High School to become one.