Pareena Gupta

Mr. Amador performs a show stopping routine inspired by Valentine’s Day during Donversity.

Amador’s student population is 51.8% Asian, 31.5% White, 9.5% Hispanic, 5.6% Multiracial, and 0.3% Pacific Islander. Amador celebrates this diversity through its week-long Donversity tradition. This year’s theme for Donversity was “Every Don Matters.” 

“The theme is chosen by the Don Varsity Committee, which is made up of students from clubs and classes all over campus, and they started meeting in October, and they threw out a whole bunch of different ideas, and that was the one that they voted on,” said Leadership Advisor Wendy Connelly. 

Each year the Leadership team carefully chooses a different theme to represent Amador. This year they chose the phrase “Every Don Matters.” This phrase illustrates the uniqueness of each individual and how each Amador member is an important piece of this school.

“Diversity is really important because you can’t just have strictly one type of something, especially a person and diversity allows for people to learn about other cultures, and it just makes everything really well balanced,” said Sophia Chang (‘29). 

Change in plans 

Typically, Donversity takes place later in the spring semester, with last year’s events occurring in the first week of March. But this year, unexpected weather conditions caused the Leadership team to reschedule plans last minute. 

“This year we started planning in October. We had all four days planned for events. And then this giant storm came in, and we had to totally pivot. But I think the committee did a great job turning a week of activities into Don Diversity Day on Friday, so that we could still make sure that everybody could attend all the different events,” said Connelly. 

Diversity on display

Donversity engages Amador students through various different activities, all of which connect to the idea of embracing diversity. Students played the annual Donversity board game during ACCESS. Emulating the classic game Snakes and Ladders, students moved across squares on the board by rolling a dice. In between, they stopped and answered questions about themselves and the history of Amador. 

“When I saw the theme, I first originally thought of making some sort of design with different hands because for the assignment, we had to look at inspiration. When I searched up diversity posters, I just saw a lot of images showing different hands to represent people. And then I also thought of different puzzle pieces coming together, kind of how every piece matters in a puzzle to make a bigger picture,” said designer of this year’s board game, Claire Shriber (‘27). 

Students in the Digital Art & Graphic Design class were tasked with designing the Donversity board game and poster. Leadership then anonymously voted on the best design. In addition to bonding over a board game, students gathered in the large gym for the annual Donversity Rally during third period on Friday last week. It featured a variety of performances from different clubs.

“I enjoyed performing with my friends. I made a lot of new friends during this group, so I thought [Donversity] was a really good way to connect with new people, but also in the end, it was just such a fun group to perform with. And all of us were so hyped, and it was a really good performance overall,” said Korean Culture Club performer, Allison Chen (‘27).

While the board game enables students to get to know each other, the Donversity rally spotlights cultures. Clubs used dance and music in their showcases. On the whole, Donversity is a celebration of the diverse characters, cultures, and backgrounds Amador students have.

“High school kids are young, and I think that people are so afraid of being different. But I think we should realize that it’s those differences that make us, you know, truly amazing and special. And I think this rally is something that’s really important for us to do, so that we recognize that being different is a good thing,” said Connelly.