Before you read:

For the past couple years, Water Wars has been a part of the senior year experience. The event, which consists of seniors trying to eliminate each other by finding opponents and spraying them with water, comes around in April. Teams are pinned against each other for one week with the event as a whole taking place over three weeks. With the recent Water Wars this year, there has been some conflict as to whether or not the school should sanction this event. 

Pro: The school should sanction Water Wars

Even though Water Wars can be fun, there are some issues with the event, including planning, funding, and rule enforcement. At some points during the event these issues, especially with rules, would come up whenever there was a contentious elimination or an elimination would take too long to get confirmed.  Much of these issues came from the lack of school sanctioning and having only one anonymous event organizer. If the school could control the event, it would be easier to organize the event and could lead to more effective rule enforcement. With school sanctioning there could be a team of rule enforcers rather than just one who could quickly confirm who got who, likely reducing problems in the process. 

Another possibility for the school sanctioning Water Wars would be having a faculty member to approach in case an incident occurs that requires school involvement. Accidents happen but depending on the severity, administration involvement could lead to less concern if something were to go wrong during the event and prevent anger and frustration over the game. Overall school sanctioning would improve Water Wars by making it safer and easier to plan. 

Con: The school shouldn’t sanction Water Wars

While it is true that many students find Water Wars to be super fun and enjoyable, there are some downsides to having the school host this event. The first of these being the negative effects on the community. Having people chase others with water guns throughout the community could cause disruptions to potentially businesses and households, so it may not be the best idea for the school to promote an event that could upset community members. In addition to community members, it could also interfere with other students not participating while they are on school grounds, further damaging the argument for the school to sanction the event.

 Another consideration would be the cost to host such an event. Adding an event like this would increase the amount of things the school would have to pay for, and money can’t just be handed to a new event out of the blue. This means some amount of money would either have to be cut from somewhere else or money would have to be paid by participants of Water Wars. The amount of money required to be paid by students participating would likely be higher than it currently is as well because of the extra planning and preparation that would be required if the school were to sanction it. For these reasons, I believe that the school should continue to not sanction Water Wars moving forward.