Last week, AV Leadership planned a HoliDON Spirit Week. The week included celebrating music, clubs, holidays, and Amador, as well as a door decorating contest. 

For this spirit week, leadership hoped to connect to students during remote learning and create opportunities for people to demonstrate their school and holiday spirit. The timing of the spirit week was also planned to reduce stress before finals.

“Leadership really wanted to create a fun holiday spirit week because we know that students are really stressed at this time and they have finals coming up. We wanted to create something that people who celebrate a variety of holidays can do,” said Leadership student Maya Morgenstern (‘21).

Leadership has been working hard this year to help students feel connected to Amador and their peers, especially during remote learning when there is no form of in-person interaction. It is also a challenge to find activities that everyone can participate in while being cautious of health guidelines.

“We have adapted to being online by changing some activities we would normally be able to do at school for students to be able to do at home. We also have had to learn what activities work best and gain the most student participation so we can continue to do those, as well as make sure to follow the school guidelines on what we can do during this time,” said Leadership student Jordan Lederer (‘21).

Despite these changes, some members of the student body feel that the efforts to maintain school spirit have been mostly ineffective, due to the nature of online learning and can be improved on in the future.

“I don’t think that spirit weeks are effective because students are on their own in their homes and there’s a disconnect between fellow students over zoom which makes it hard for it to feel like a school-wide thing,” said Nick Strain (‘21).

On the other hand, spirit weeks have also received positive feedback. The different activities Leadership plans attempt to maintain as much as normalcy as possible so that students do not feel completely disconnected from others. This purpose is served in the eyes of certain students that have participated in spirit weeks or days.

“Personally, I really like the spirit events! It’s always really nice to see classmates on the leadership Instagram who I haven’t seen since last year. In my opinion, it just gives students a small sense of solidarity and school spirit, which is really hard to convey during online school,” said Sara Vannoni (‘23).

HoliDON week is just one example of leadership’s consistent efforts to build school spirit this semester. Online learning poses certain difficulties to this effort and some students have made suggestions to deal with these challenges.

“I think that leadership is doing great in terms of planning the spirit activities, however, they need to offer more detail about what the activities are and how they will function virtually rather than just putting up an Instagram story with the event’s name,” said Strain (‘21).