During February of every year, we celebrate Black History Month. We celebrate this month to create awareness and remember important people and events in African American history.

Wiregrass Ranch High School (WRHS) has a lot of events running this month. These events include: music through the intercom every Friday honoring African American artists, a trivia question every morning, a multi-media contest in digital design, a staff lunch in, a spirit week and many guest speakers.

Eshonda Swackard is a teacher on the Black History Month committee and helped plan the events here at WRHS. She explained why Black History Month is so important.

“Mostly, it’s just awareness. It can be about music, food, different types of trivia, and awareness of key individuals who played a role for African-Americans,” says Ms. Swackard.

“HBC is for you” is the theme of this year’s Black History Month at WRHS to help bring awareness to historically African-American colleges.

“[The purpose of Black History Month is] to bring awareness to students. This year, we have ‘HBC is for you’ which stands for historical black colleges. We have identified 13 schools and we are providing awareness of those schools for the students on the 24th, ” explains Ms. Swackard.

Black History Month Spirit Week starts on Monday, February 13th.

“On spirit week this year, Monday is bow tie day. On Tuesday, we have silly socks day, and on Wednesday we have Mardi Gras day with people dressing up in those colors (gold, purple, and green). Thursday is blackout day and Friday is college day,” says Ms. Swackard.

There is also trivia every morning with a weekly prize for a classroom.

“Each morning, a student reads the trivia question after the morning announcements. And then, teachers call in the answers. If they get it correct, then I collect that teacher’s name and at the end of the week, I draw a name out of the jar and that’s the winner for the week,” explains Ms. Swackard.