WAMS Students Earn Trip to 'Hunger Games' Premiere

Around mid-morning today, roughly 600-plus (WAMS) students will pile into school buses and shuttle off to catch the big-screen premiere of The Hunger Games.

Sure beats watching The Crucible or another Shakespeare adaptation.

In case you haven’t had any contact with teens or pre-teens for the last couple years or have been living under a rock, The Hunger Games is based on the novel of the same name, the first part of a trilogy by Suzanne Collins that has been hugely popular with the young adult crowd since its debut.

The book, which tells a story of teens in a dystopian world who compete in a televised battle to the death, was included on a list of selected young adult literature given to WAMS students at the beginning of the school year, said principal Carole Butler.

Many of them read the book as part of a schoolwide read-a-thon to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit assisting wounded veterans that was chosen as a service project for the entire school. WAMS students raised more than $3,000 for the organization through the read-a-thon and other fundraising activities.

“We wanted to reward them for the read-a-thon,” said Butler. “When we announced we were going (to see the movie), a cheer went up through the building. You would think I gave them the day off … You could hear it in the office.”

The entire school, both seventh and eighth grade classes, were invited on the field trip. Nearly all are going, according to the principal, though a few parents did express concern about the story’s subject matter.

“There was some concern for some of the seventh graders: Are they ready for some of the material, some of the discussions?” she said. Most students are between 13 and 14, so the school is putting its faith in the Motion Picture Association of America’s PG-13 rating.

A very small minority of parents opted not to send their children, while some students opted out on their own, according to Butler. But for the most part, the kids are jazzed.

And so are the teachers. In the digital age, educators constantly battle for students’ attention with smartphones, Facebook, cute kitten pictures, etc. Reading often gets lost in the fray.

So when a book comes along that gets kids excited about reading—even gets them talking about it in the classroom—“we’re gonna jump on it,” said Butler. "We're trying to capitalize on the excitement." 

“There’s all these great topics for kids to talk about (in the book),” she added. “Because there’s been so much conversation about it, it’s kind of eked back into the classroom.”

Though she hasn’t read the books herself—“I have a 3-year-old, so my reading is limited to 3-year-old things”—Butler said the story deals with issues relevant to young adults, like bullying, developing strong peer-to-peer relationships, and becoming independent.

“There’s so many elements of things we can focus in on,” she said.

The students will attend a special 10 a.m. screening of the sure-to-be blockbuster film at the Rave Motion Pictures Ritz in Voorhees. WAMS is one of several schools going to see the film at the Rave, Butler said.