“We thought … how do we make it so that the first Friday at Berkeley High (School) is not this negative experience of kids feeling anxiety about ‘am I going to get egged or not?’,” BHS Principal Juan Raygoza said.
BHS has a long history of rowdy school spirit and freshman hazing. Students may face consequences, such as school suspension, for egging and similar rule violations. For seniors, being caught breaking these rules may also be the difference between a teacher writing them a college recommendation letter or not. Either way, every year there are disciplinary issues.
Despite this, students are still egged during lunch on Shattuck Ave., after school, more grave violations tend to occur. In 2014, after BHS went as far as to cancel Spirit Week because of behavior concerns, it resulted in a student mob after students decided to go forward with the tradition anyway. Presently, BHS has decided to take a more unifying and less punitive approach to try and curb student disruptions on school spirit days.
During the lunch of the first Friday of the new school year, Aug. 14, 2026, hundreds of freshmen congregated on the football field for the first annual Freshman Welcome Event. After being brought there 15 minutes before the end of their third period classes, students were waiting in line for free lunch, getting sweets from an ice cream truck, playing games, and browsing resource tables.
The event was planned with the purpose of replacing the annual unsolicited BHS tradition of egging freshmen, with a more welcoming version of “Freshman Friday.”
“When I was a student here back in the 90s, I remember seeing a classmate put in a garbage can,” Cassandra Tesch, the BHS dean of students and the primary organizer of the Freshman Welcome Event, said.
Freshman were mandated to stay at the event for the last part of their third period when their class was on the field, but once lunch began, many left and went off campus. However, even halfway through the lunch period, Raygoza predicted that between three and four hundred out of the roughly eight hundred freshmen were still on the field.
“I did end up going out, but I came back because I know my friends are here,” BHS freshman Francesca Furstenfeld Silan said, “I think most people I know are here. I think most of them don’t want to get egged, so they came here.”
During the event, in addition to enjoying food and drinks donated by hundreds of BHS families, freshmen had the opportunity to toss around a football and do a scavenger hunt. If students managed to take a picture with various BHS faculty members — such as Principal Raygoza — they won a gift card.
Peter Seibel, a computer science teacher at BHS, has his own school spirit tradition. This year, he bought sixty chocolate Kinder eggs and offered them to his senior students for a very particular goal; “They have to find a freshman that they don’t know … walk up to them, introduce themselves, and then hand them the egg and say ‘you’ve been egged.’ And then optionally take a selfie.” Several seniors attended the event to hand out chocolate eggs.
The administration is trying different approaches to minimize disorder on school spirit days. One plan is to host a similar event for seniors in October. BHS has hosted this senior event the last three years and, according to Raygoza, has seen attendance from hundreds of seniors.
“This (event) does not address the fact that sometimes it’s actually upperclassmen who are targeting each other, or juniors versus seniors, those kinds of things. But at least for the ninth grade students, and those who feel very anxious, they have a safe space,” Tesch said.