Following an annual BVNW tradition, the Diversity Assembly will take place Mar. 3. This year’s theme is Just Be. Diversity Club president Gavin Mullin said the theme was inspired by a Calvin Klein advertisement.

“We thought it would be cool because it’s very simple, but it’s very effective, like just be you,” Mullin said.

Diversity Club sponsor Sarah Derks said the club selected this theme because it is broad.

“Sometimes we ask you to be so many different things, we want you to just be you whoever that is and that’s kind of just be,” Derks said. “Just be you and accept that and be okay with that and accept that other people are just going to be them and some people can be silly and some people can be loving and compassionate and innovative.”

Mullin said the assembly this year will include speakers, a flag routine with different cultural flags, a group from the University of Kansas doing an Indian dance and a culture dance put on by BVNW students. Mullin said the culture dance will take the place of the typical Indian culture dance and has been organized by Junior Grace Fugate.

“The culture dance in the previous years has only been Indian dancing, but the culture dance this year is organized by Grace instead,” Mullin said. “The person who organized it in the past graduated, so now Grace took the responsibility. Instead of just doing Indian [dances], we decided to do Greek [K-Pop, Indian] and Latin American, so it’s more of a mash up.”

Fugate said she considered what the dance styles would look like when she chose the cultures featured in the dance.

“Originally we were just thinking about the dances themselves like which ones are fun and lively,” Fugate said. “We kind of looked at our school and what people would appreciate and what people knew. So we just tried to incorporate different aspects of our school into it.”

Fugate said the culture dance came as a result of the former dancers leaving. She said the new group did not feel qualified to organize a dance only based on Indian culture, so they opted to include a variety of cultures.

“[In] the years before, it was solely Bollywood or Indian culture,” Fugate said. “This year, because that group of kids wasn’t able to do it when we decided to take it on, we wanted to make it different because we didn’t feel like we were equipped to teach everyone the Bollywood culture because we didn’t know it. So we thought it would be fun if we got different cultures involved and made different segments of four or five cultures together into one dance instead of sticking to that one.”

Derks said she hopes the students enjoy the assembly and gain a greater sense of diversity this year.

“I feel like this is an assembly that kids really enjoy most of the time, so hopefully they walk away with a better sense of the diversity in our building…there’s so much more diversity of thought even within a race or religion or gender or sexuality and be able to accept who they are within that… that’s always a goal every year. I would love that to be an everyday goal, but this is the one day of the year where we try to highlight different cultures.”