Club bake sales, hands-on activities and a rally in the gym. On May 23, students gathered for the annual Unity Fair, hosted by Peer Mediation. The fair featured new activities and a renewed focus on community.

Junior Sophia Park, a Peer Mediation executive, helped prepare the event. Initial planning started around March, with the executive team intending to build on last year’s success while introducing fresh activities to keep students engaged.

“Our goals were just to make it fun for everyone, have it be a relaxing day after everyone has AP testing and Keystone testing and also to promote unity within the school,” Park said.

The day started with an hour-long homeroom, during which Peer Mediation members prepared the day’s activities. Students watched a video informing them of the event, wrote about what unity meant to them on a piece of paper, and looped the papers together to create a “unity chain.” After homeroom, students were allowed to explore all the activities during four 40-minute periods.

During these periods, Peer Mediation and faculty members hosted activities at the baseball field, in the gym and in rooms across the school. Students could partake in various activities such as spikeball, painting and board games. After the four periods, specific grades were called down to the cafeteria during periods five and six so students could eat lunch.

“Instead of hosting a bunch of individual rooms, we’re assigning specific departments with doing certain games, like the math department is doing games related to math,” Park said. “We opened up a bunch more activities outside this year and we got rid of some of the stuff that people said bothered them.”

Junior Amy Li, a Peer Mediation executive, hosted an escape room in room 142 during all four periods. Participants had to solve multiple puzzles to unlock a box that held the final clue revealing the secret to school spirit, tying the challenge into the Unity Fair’s overall theme of connection and community.

“This escape room and the idea that you have to work together with the people around you to solve clues and utilize each other’s strengths — some people may be better at logic puzzles, some at physical puzzles and some at mazes — and the fact that you have to talk to one another and communicate about what clues you found and work together as a group to find the secret to school spirit, I think encapsulates the idea of Unity Fair really well,” Li said.

Throughout the day, students and staff could earn points for their team, either Garnet or Gray, that Peer Mediation assigned based on homeroom teachers’ departments.

During the pep rally in periods seven and eight, students had the chance to win additional points through new games like the air mattress relay race, hula hoop contest and volleyball match.

“I like that Unity Fair signals the beginning of summer, although it’s not like directly the last day of school, but it signals the school coming to an end and a moment where we sit together and appreciate all that we’ve done this year,” Li said. “I think it’s a very good moment to bring the school together.”

Rajan Saha can be reached at [email protected].