Every year, in addition to their tie-dye shirt, senior planning designs black shirts for seniors to wear in the class picture. From an Astroworld themed shirt for the class of 2020, to the class of 2025’s simple red, white and blue design, every class shirt is unique.
The process for designing the senior shirt begins after senior planning (splanning) members are selected at the end of junior year. “During the summer, splanning just brainstormed a couple of ideas, gathering designs on pinterest,” senior class secretary Justin Kim said.
Unlike other senior classes, the class of 2025 didn’t ask people to send in designs or hold a design contest. However, they still wanted to get the student body involved in the decision. “We decided that a poll would be best, choosing four designs that the class would vote on through Instagram,” Kim said.
While a shirt featuring Frank Ocean ultimately won the Instagram poll, a more simple design with “seniors” written in all caps in red, white and blue stripes was selected. “The design that won couldn’t be printed by the shirt printing company, so we decided to go with a basic design we pulled from a shirt template website,” Kim said.
Students like senior Neil Kotval were unhappy with the design as a whole. “I’m sick of boring senior shirts that no one would wear a second after graduation. Shouldn’t we make senior shirts that make people want to represent their school spirit?” Kotval said.
Seniors were also upset that the class design did not match what the class voted on. “I feel like they didn’t consider our opinions. Even though I didn’t even vote for the design that won, I still would’ve appreciated splanning doing what the class as a whole wanted,” senior Katherine Hua said.
Even as a class officer, Kim shares the senior class’ frustration. “I didn’t really like our shirt picking process this year, and I agree it’s completely unfair that we vetoed a design that the class voted on. We definitely should’ve started planning this earlier by having contests at the end of junior year and during the summer, voting earlier and more,” Kim said.
Despite the senior class’s overall disappointment with the design, splanning said they did what they could. “We decided to make a more basic shirt that incorporated our class colors to contribute to school spirit. We did our best with the options we had,” splanning member Shivani Jain said.
To produce the shirt, Splanning sent the design to music teacher Keith Schwartz’s shirt printing contact. “They print the shirts for a lot cheaper than a big company like Customink. It’s also just a lot easier to set prices because Customink has this really complicated pricing calculator for group orders,” Kim said.
Senior shirts were priced at $20 this year, with the tie-dye shirt and senior shirt bundle being sold for a discounted price of $35, more expensive than the $13.50 senior shirts from class of 2022. “Splanning decided that this was a reasonable price that could potentially raise a lot of money for prom while not being overly expensive. Overall, we ended up making around $1,500,” Kim said.
