by Lexi Paidas ‘17

B-CC is starting a new homecoming tradition this year; there will be no king or queen categories when voting for homecoming court. Students will instead nominate each other by writing down two names of people that they believe represent the values of the school. The victorious candidates will then be honored at the homecoming dance. Winners will be asked before their crowing whether or not they would like to be crowned as a “king” or a “queen.”

This new tradition was put into place after a 4 to 1 vote by the B-CC school-wide SGA. “It provides an opportunity for all students to be involved in something that was exclusionary. It is really not our job, especially with a gender-neutral and transgender population at B-CC, to tell people that boys have to be kings and girls have to be queens. Who are we to put people into those categories?” Jacob Rains, president of the SGA, said. This change creates the possibility of having two winners of the same gender, a transgender student or a traditional boy-girl pair win.

B-CC has an active LGBT club called Spectrum and has made other changes in alliance with transgender students such as creating a gender-neutral bathroom on the third floor of the school. Many schools, including Sherwood, are doing away with the tradition of distributing different colored graduation robes to students on the basis of gender and are instead opting to give out only one robe color for all students, regardless of gender, to wear.