On October 8th students and teachers filed into the small gym to watch the much anticipated Homecoming video. This year’s Homecoming candidates spent two days filming the video, which was themed “elections”. They dressed up as various characters and did their best to convince the student body to vote for them.

When the video rolled, however, many students and faculty were surprised to see that a large part of one couple’s section was cut out of the video. Seniors Bradley Collicot and Peyton Brown, who were “the three schools” candidates, sat in the bleachers as they watched the screen informing the viewers that their part was too extreme.

“I was pretty disappointed [when my part got cut out],” Collicot said. “I was excited to see myself in the video and get introduced to the school. Homecoming was really exciting but that was just a huge disappointment.”

According to Collicot and Brown the videos were cut because of comments they made about Lawrence High School; however, no official statement was made about the reasoning behind the edits.

“My understanding is that they didn’t like that we talked about LHS,” Brown said. “With the vandalism in the past they just said that it wasn’t appropriate to reference LHS as much as we did, but it was in the script so.”

Scott Smith and Julie Boyd were both asked to comment about the reasoning behind the edits, but neither responded. Principal Myron Graber, however, provided some explanation for the edits.

“[The video was changed] to make it more appropriate for school,” Graber said. “I know that sometimes, that whole censorship debate and everything, I just think in that setting it needed to be appropriate because we’re running it to the whole school.”

Graber also believes that the video should have been more about showcasing the candidates instead of making political satire.

“In today’s media there is a lot of sarcasm and a lot of innuendos,” Graber said. “You watch the political debates and their knocking each other all around, but I don’t think that’s the purpose of this video. To me it should be about getting to know your candidates.”

As for how this situation should be handled in the future, Brown and Collicot believe there should be some revisions in the video making process.

“I think they should definitely read the script before they film anything,” Brown said. “Just read it beforehand and if they had any problems with it we could have changed it when we still had time to film stuff.”

Collicot and Brown still have a positive outlook on their overall homecoming experience, however.
“I think it was a small little bump in the road. Homecoming was still a lot of fun and I try not to think about it too much,” Brown said.