See You At the Pole Tomorrow Morning at Milbank Schools

The phenomenon See You at the Pole™ – a student-organized event being held across the nation tomorrow morning, September 25, will take place at MHS, MMS, and Milbank Elementary. Students will meet under the flagpoles at 7:45 a.m. for student-led prayers. Everyone from the community is also invited. The event is being coordinated by Brody Ninneman, Jericho Jones, Charles Whitesett, Brenna Bumgardner, Brielle Bumgardner, Tabitha McFaden, Timbree Spors, Kai Waddell, Tannen Schmieg, Tate Pew and Lennox Spors. Levi Waddell, youth coordinator at Central Church, says, “I’m just excited to see these kids take the next step in their faith and boldly lead.  It’s fun to see them take ownership of their faith!”

See You at the Pole (SYATP) is an annual gathering of thousands of Christian students at school flag poles, churches, and online for the purpose of worship and prayer. The event officially began on September 12, 1990, in Burleson, Texas, when a group of teenagers gathered to pray for several schools. 

SYATP outlines the genesis of the movement as a small group of teenagers,who came together for a DiscipleNow weekend in Texas in early 1990. They came seeking God, and little did they know how powerfully He was about to move. Compelled to pray, they drove to three different schools that Saturday night. Not knowing exactly what to do, they went to the school flagpoles and prayed for their friends, schools, and leaders. 

Others began holding similar prayer meetings at their schools, and the movement gave birth to a vision in the hearts of youth leaders across Texas. The vision was for students throughout Texas to follow these examples and meet at their school flagpoles to pray simultaneously. The challenge was named See You at the Pole™. 

At 7a.m. on September 12, 1990, more than 45,000 teenagers met at school flagpoles in four different states to pray before the start of school.  A few months later, a group of youth ministers from all over the country gathered for a national conference in Colorado. Many of them reported that their students had heard about the prayer movement in Texas. No other events had been planned, but students across the country began creating their own national day of student prayer. 

On September 11, 1991, at 7 a.m., an estimated one million students gathered at school flagpoles all over the country. From Boston, Massachusetts, to Los Angeles, California, from North Dakota to the tip of Texas, students came together to pray. Some sang, some read Scripture, but most importantly, they prayed. Like those first students, they prayed for their schools, for their friends, for their leaders, and for their country.

Within the first few years, the movement began to spread to other nations by missionaries from the U.S. Now each year, an estimated one million students from all the world participate in See You at the Pole™. Students in more than 64 countries such as Canada, Korea, Japan, Turkey, and the Ivory Coast are taking the challenge to pray.