ASB hosts remote Valentine’s Week

Arohi Bhattacharya, Senior Staff Writer
February 14, 2021

With Valentine’s Day approaching Sunday, Palo Alto High School students participated in events including Match-o-Matics and Valgrams during the annual Valentine’s Week celebration, hosted by the Associated Student Body. 

The Associated Student Body’s Instagram account promotes Valgrams, one of its two events planned for Palo Alto High School’s Valentine’s Week. ASB President and senior Avantika Singh said this annual event was easier to plan remotely than other Paly traditions. “We planned this event because while it’s something we do every year now, there haven’t been many traditional events we’ve been able to do during distance learning, and this was one event where we could do the same thing as past years, but make it a safe and virtual option,” Singh said. Photo: Paly ASB

Match-o-Matics, a Paly favorite, will deliver compatibility results via email this week to students who filled out the survey, according to ASB’s Instagram page.

Valgrams will be delivered physically to students’ doorsteps by ASB members from Feb. 12 to Feb. 14 and free to the first 400 students who filled out a Google form, indicating their preference of stuffed animal and Valgram recipient. 

Freshman Class President Shamsheer Singh said that despite the challenge of virtual events, ASB wanted to continue Valentine’s Week for new and returning students.

“Valentine’s Week is a Paly tradition that students look forward to participating in, and even with this year’s complications, we still wanted to uphold it,” Singh said. “For freshmen, this would be their first Valentine’s week, and we wanted to include as many traditions as possible to start off their high school careers, especially considering that a lot of them [Paly events] have had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.”

Singh also said that although delivering Valgrams with distance-learning is a challenge, ASB is committed to keeping the tradition alive.

“While many of our Paly traditions had to be called off as a whole, due to their reliance on in-person interactions, we have done our best to plan activities that can be done while social distancing,” Singh said. “For example, we could not deliver Valgrams to classrooms like we have in previous years, so we will deliver them home instead, keeping with safety regulations.”

According to Singh, ASB will consider student feedback from Valentine’s Week when planning future virtual events.

“We [members of ASB] have noticed that Zoom fatigue has created a drop in online interactive event participation, so we’re trying to decrease the amount of online events and potentially replace them with hybrid events that don’t involve congregations of students,” Singh said. “We’ve also been trying to incorporate more prize-incentives to reallocate our funds usually reserved for big events, like Homecoming, that were cancelled this year.”

To learn more about Valgrams and Match-o-Matics, visit the ASB’s Linktree.