After a cool reception to “High Five Fridays” the cheerleading squad felt they had found another way to help with team spirit and bonding during the fall sports season, serving breakfast. However, Chartwells, the school dining service utilized by the Big Spring School District, took over this breakfast after only five teams were served, creating hard feelings amongst the cheerleading squad.

Kevin Roberts, assistant superintendent, explained why Chartwells is the soul food provider for Big Spring School District: “With regard specifically to the Spirit Breakfasts, I look forward to this concept continuing in the coming months and years.  Chartwells is truly the Big Spring School District.  They provide a service that is directed by our school district and for our school district.  The food service response to supporting these breakfasts was something that we, as a school district, wanted to help coordinate.  Like any new idea, there can be some bumps in the road when implementing.  These will be ironed out as we move forward so that we can help coordinate this wonderful idea in support of our student athletes.” 

To cheerleaders, Madicyn Barnes and Logan Logan, this explanation was not enough and felt as though their idea, originally taken from Pinterest, was essentially pulled out from under them.

All the sports team coaches gave the cheerleaders really good feedback on their food and how pleasurable it was for them to do something like this for all the teams.

“Chartwells found out we were making our own food, and they said we can’t do that because it is not in the school’s profit, so then the school had to pay for Chartwells to cater.” said Logan.

When the word got to the Cheerleading Coach, the girls were pretty upset with how the school solved the situation.

“It made me pretty upset because we really wanted to be more interactive with us doing stuff with them and connecting more through our seasons.” said Logan.

Not only did it affect us individually, but also hurt the team because all we  wanted to do was make it more well known and to be apart of all the teams.” said Barnes.

They were thinking of doing a pregame snack for the other teams, but don’t know if Chartwells would approve. “Last year we did a Gatorade and chocolate for the girls’ basketball and boys for their senior nights. We are hoping we can do it for every home game.” said Barnes.

The only people that have had the Chartwells breakfast was the Marching Band.

Barnes is also in the marching band she plays the flute. She said “Their food could’ve been better, and they had plastic knives, so when I would cut my waffle it would also cut my plate.”

“But the overall point was that we just really wanted to just support the teams and provide more for them.” said Barnes and Logan.

Chartwells did not wish to comment and directed Paw Print to the comments by Assistant Superintendent Roberts.