Editor’s note: The Dart is withholding the former student’s name due to concerns expressed by STA president Nan Bone, in addition to the former student and her family.
Earlier this month, the administration confiscated the dance team’s sweatshirts after discovering that the sweatshirts included the name of a former student.
The administration became aware of the sweatshirts when a former STA parent and attorney contacted president Nan Bone to inform her that the sweatshirts featured the name of a former student.
The former student declined to comment on the record for this article.
The idea for the sweatshirt came from a dance team tradition that seniors have passed down since 2004: a mailbag mascot that the team named after a former student. Over the years, the team has filled the bag with medals from competitions, notes to each other and even food. According to dance team member Lindsay Cook, no one on the team realized that their mascot is actually a former STA student who left the school before graduating.
“We were shocked [when we found out it was a former student] because we didn’t know it would turn into such a big deal,” Cook said. “[The bag] had been made so many years before so we didn’t know what the whole story was. It was just a tradition. We all just passed it down without knowing the full story.”
In honor of the bag, which has been passed down since its creation, the team designed sweatshirts featuring the bag this year. The sweatshirts included a drawn picture of the bag with the words, ‘Seriously, there’s no way [she’s] single,’Â and on the picture of the bag is the name of the former student.
According to Cook, the idea for the sweatshirt came from a joke a fellow camper at the University of Central Missouri’s dance camp said.
After Bone spoke with the attorney, she spoke with two of the dance team captains, seniors Betsy Tampke and Taylor Kramer, to get a better idea of the bag, the sweatshirts and the traditions behind them.
“Talking to Betsy [and Taylor], I knew it was totally innocent,’Â Bone said. ‘In the end, when I made the decision to pull them, I told the dance team ‘ËœIt’s not you, I know you didn’t do anything mean to the [former] student. But it’s not appropriate to be wearing a sweatshirt with a former student’s name on it without their permission.'”
After speaking with Tampke and Kramer, Bone asked dance team sponsor Stacie O’Rear to speak with the rest of the dance team members about the decision to confiscate the sweatshirts. Bone also decided, because she doesn’t want to waste the sweatshirts, to send them with a student on a mission trip for donation.
‘When I told [the team] what the situation was, they were all very concerned because I don’t think the girls wanted to make fun of somebody or do anything derogatory toward somebody,” O’Rear said. ‘They were all very willing to turn the sweatshirts in and go for a different design.’Â
Along with the removal of the sweatshirts, O’Rear informed the team at their State competition last weekend that it would be the bag’s last tournament. Once the freshman that has the bag gives it to O’Rear, she plans to hand it over to the administration.
‘Why keep it?” O’Rear said. “If it’s a negative thing toward a person, I don’t think they’d want to keep it. I don’t think they want to be looked at in any way as doing something that’s negative toward somebody else that they don’t even know.”
