Along with the start of the new school year, De Soto High School has introduced a brand new phone app to help spread information about future school activities and boost attendance at extracurricular events.

Activities Director Ryan Johnson played an important role in the creation of the Wildcat Nation app. Johnson described some of the informational sections on the app.

“On the app, we have events. The events will be [things like] varsity athletics, and then band and choir concerts, musicals, debate tournaments, things like that,” Johnson said. “We have the Twitter [section], and we will continue to update any team or activity group that has a Twitter account, that way, within the app, you can see all the tweets that have to do with De Soto High School. The Wildcat HQ [section] has four more informational outlets, just in a more convenient place. There’s the school website, the Wildcat Nation website, the Green Pride and the digital announcements.”

According to Student Council sponsor Katie Meserko, the Wildcat Nation app is an improved way of connecting with students.

“It’s an app that we can use to try to amp up school spirit. There was a lot of disconnect in previous years of, ‘Hey, I didn’t know that meeting was today,’ or, ‘Hey, what spirit day is it?’ or whatever. [The app] is kind of acting as a way to eliminate all of that,” Meserko said. “Any information you ever need is all in one spot now, and we know that almost every kid has a phone and is always on it, so if they’re going to check anything, it’s going to be their phone.”

In addition to DHS Twitter feeds, extracurricular activity information and general announcements, the Wildcat Nation app features a revival of the class cup.

“The class cup is like the leaderboard, and so our users on the app could be students, could be faculty, could be parents, could be just general Wildcat fans and so all of those are listed there,” Johnson said. “There are three different leaderboards [on the app]. In the ‘All’ section is everybody that’s a user on the app. Then you have it by seminar teacher, so that way, if we decide to reward a Seminar that’s just killing it in points, we can track that. Then, obviously, [there’s a section] by grade. That’s where students have to be diligent about their account and make sure that they mark the right grade, because if they’re getting points but they don’t have ‘senior’ selected, the senior class isn’t getting those points towards their total for the class cup.”

The new class cup system is considered an improvement to the trial-and-error run from several years ago.

“Now we’re adding class cup points, which we tried to do two years ago,” Meserko said. “But we had to have StuCo kids sit there at games and mark it by asking [students], ‘Okay, you’re in what grade?’ and do it by tallies, which just got into a mess; too many people, too many going in and out. Now people can just check in on their phones and boom, it’ll go straight to the system and no work is needed and it’s really accurate.”

While not all rewards for the class cup have been officially determined, students who want to earn class cup points must make sure to fill out their entire profile.

The Wildcat Nation app is available for both iPhones and Androids.