The annual senior picnic was recently canceled for this school year, due to not selling the number of tickets which needed to be sold for the trip to occur. This year’s picnic came under scrutiny from the senior class, with widespread disapproval of the location of the picnic. Previously, the picnic has been held at H&H Ranch, but this year it had been planned for Kingwood Country Club, after the H&H Ranch closed recently.

  “I mean what can you do [at Kingwood Country Club], other than swimming in the pool and that’s it,” senior Harvey Avila said. “We can do that with our friends every weekend if we wanted to. So for us paying 40 bucks just to be able to go to the pool… It would just be a waste of money.”

  Avila started a petition to change the location of the senior picnic, which by his own count, was signed by almost 300 of the 420 students in the senior class. After his DEN teacher, Ms. Theil, asked the class what they thought of the trip and received negative responses, Avila began his petition, which he brought with him to five of his classes as well as B and C lunch.

  Seniors say that the cause of the dislike was the location of this year’s picnic. “Nobody wanted to go,” Avila said. “ A week before the last pay day, they only had 40 tickets [sold]. And that was pretty fascinating, [because] they needed [roughly] 250 students to actually get in. That’s way off.”

  Marshall Leonard, president of the senior class, was involved in planning this year’s picnic. To Leonard’s knowledge, this is the first year in KPARK’s history to not have a senior picnic.

  “A lot of [seniors] didn’t even understand that H&H closed down… I don’t think they understood all the effort that went into just getting the Kingwood Country Club,” Leonard says.

  “I would like kids to not blame the administration,” he continues. “I’ve heard a lot of kids saying ‘Oh they don’t really care about us, they don’t try’. You can’t really put the blame on anybody except the entire grade, because the opportunity was there and nobody bought tickets. The administration really did do everything they could and they tried really hard to give us anything they could.”

  Teacher Kyle Dray is the senior class sponsor, and his role for the senior picnic was to find viable locations to have the picnic. “As far as the petition that a few of the Seniors started, I’m really not sure what they thought the end goal would be,” he says. “ We had already explored the option they were proposing.

  Dray says it was not feasible to have the senior picnic anywhere other than the country club. “The country club was the last option we had. We looked at a couple places outside of the area that were indoors game type facilities, but it would take two hours out of the day to get there and back.  That wouldn’t give the Seniors a whole lot of time to enjoy their day.  Distance was an issue with the only other outdoor place that we felt would have been safe enough as well.”

  Avila was and still is upset that he will not be able to go on a senior picnic. “ I wish I could do something, but I can’t,” Avila said.

  Leonard is upset as well.  “I don’t want to be the only senior class to have a senior picnic,” Leonard said. “I would have loved to go. But you know, can’t really do anything about it now. I wish the [students] kinda would have just been more understanding, like even if it’s not exactly a perfect day and exactly what you want to do, it’s still a day that you get off of school to just hang out with your friends.”  

  Avila, however, is still optimistic.

  “It’s never too late to have a senior picnic,” he said.