Visitors Enjoy National Night Out
Story and Photos By Mayra Gallegos |
On Oct. 4th National Night Out was open to the public from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. with over 2,000 attending. Many students, teachers, administrators, counselors and families attended.
All National Night Out celebrations usually have the same purpose, “and that being a community event, and originally designed to bring public officials like police officers and firemen, and have them engage with community and create that congenial work environment,” Melvin Echard, Principal said.
As of early July, ideas start and getting contacts of people who want to be involved start entering.
National Night Out is generally organized by a lot of people, Rackspace, our family specialist Francisco Martinez and many more.
“It took a lot of effort to pull National Night Out together, the planning from July to the day of, I don’t see a way that we could be as productive as a program as we had yesterday without Francisco Martinez, our family specialist, he’s primarily in charge of making sure our community events go well and he did an absolutely fantastic job with very little planning; we are very very lucky to have him,” Echard said.
Tables started setting up at 3 p.m. and individual participants start setting up their booths as of 4:30 pm. There were over 100 participants for booths.
Freshman Crystal Mena paints faces at National Night Out. Many students and people from the community were able to get free face painting by the Art students from Roosevelt High.
At National Night Out, the robotics team had out demo robots for kids to use.
Visitors fill the courtyard for National Night Out.
Although there were many people at Roosevelt that night, there wasn’t much mess in the courtyard. Most participants were responsible with their booth and since there was many people, nobody could just throw their trash anywhere.
There are over 700 National Night Outs going on, held annually in all of San Antonio. Roosevelt High School is part of that 700.
Every year San Antonio awards what they think was the best National Night out, last year Roosevelt High School won first. “We do it because we want to unite the community. We never do it with the intention of winning an award, It’s just that we do it so well that we do end up winning an award,” Principal Echard said.
National Night Out was a big and fun night for everyone who attended.
“It was pretty cool. My drill team, the Riderettes performed,” sophomore Liliana Castaneda said. “This year was better…the music and all the stands and all that were better than last year.”
The next community event will be DATA’s first Steam Carnival on Nov.11, 2016 from 6:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. in the Roosevelt Courtyard. The Steam Carnival will include hands on activities, performances, demonstrations and a variety of interactive exhibits featuring Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics.