Spirit Week will kick off with seniors in the lead after they earned the most spirit points in last week’s Viking Week by having the highest participation rate.
For the weeklong event, Palo Alto High School’s Associated Student Body assigned a daily task to all students. Classes with the highest participation earned points towards Spirit Week, which has been postponed to next semester due to the campus shutdown.
“For a virtual event, I would say Viking Week was a success,” Spirit Commissioner Sabrina Chan said. “From past virtual events, I assumed we would get a low turnout but a decent number of people participated — especially in Paly Search. And the best part was the freshman participated as well.”
On Day One, the task was to submit a TikTok video showing Paly pride. Of the nine submissions, 50% were from seniors, 33.3% from sophomores, 16.7% from freshman and 0% from juniors. Similar trends continued for the tasks that followed throughout the week, which included a trick shot video, a self-timer photo, and a piece of Paly-related art.
“I hope in the future we can host spirit events with an in-person component to improve the social aspect missing from distance learning.”
— Sabrina Chan, Spirit Commissioner
The final rankings placed seniors in first place (500 spirit points), sophomores in second place (300 spirit points), juniors in third place (200 spirit points), and freshmen in last place (100 spirit points).
However, according to Chan, no class had high enough participation to make them eligible for a class reward, such as dumping ice water on or pieing a class officer.
In addition to daily tasks, ASB members also placed QR codes all around Palo Alto for the Paly Search activity which ran for the duration of the week, and those who scanned the codes were entered into a $15 Paly Spirit Store reimbursement raffle.
All students who submitted media for the daily tasks were entered into a $15 In-N-Out Burger reimbursement raffle. The winners for each raffle will be announced in the Viking Week Highlight video later this week.
According to Chan, ASB hopes that Viking Week and similar events will help build the Paly community, and help make the best of online learning.
“I hope in the future we can host spirit events with an in-person component to improve the social aspect missing from distance learning,” Chan said.
ASB is continuing efforts to build community throughout this month; at lunch on Nov. 12–13 and 16–17, ASB is hosting an Among Us tournament where the winners will win an In-N-Out meal. More details about the rules of the tournament will be released soon.
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