love week

Behind the scenes of Love Week.

Red and pink hearts decorate campus, in celebration of Valentines Day. This year’s Love Week featured Valgrams, matchomatics, polaroid photoshoots, and ring pop proposals.

Senior and Palo Alto Unified School District board representative Johannah Seah was part of the team that helped organize Love Week. The event had lots of different components to it and required extensive planning and organization, according to Seah.

Because the system of organizing Valagrams last year was flawed, Seah and the team had to come up with a new solution to solve this problem. They decided to use an online form where students could pay. Then, students would send a confirmation slip to ASB so that they could have a paper tally of all the orders and check that off on a spreadsheet.

“We did spend more money on Valagrams this year, but that was worth it because the animals are so cute,” Seah said.

“And I think for Valgrams, there was just a lot of behind the scenes work because every single day you would have to organize all the responses,” Seah said. “You have to make sure all the information is accurate, you have to screen the messages which are appropriate, which is what Associate Student Body adviser Mr. [Steve] Gallagher would do as an as a adult in our adviser. You would also have to pre-package the Valagrams, which I think we’re very efficient with. But ASB puts a lot of time into packing all 464 of them.”

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, matchomatics was an annual tradition at Paly. Last year, the Paly’s admins vetoed the idea. This year, ASB worked hard to make the idea of the event more appealing, proposing the idea of giving them out for free, not collecting students’ email addresses, and writing their own questions specific to Paly.

“I think people don’t realize that matchomatics is actually a little bit pricey because it’s meant to be a fundraiser where people purchase so you get your money back and we get a profit, but we decided to not do that again have a giveaway, but it’s about like 70 cents per printout sheet.”

Although this year’s Love Week was successful overall, some students thought the execution of the week’s activities felt weak compared to how exciting they were made out to be. Many others were only interested in one or two of the activities offered during the week.

“Most of the ASB activities are catered towards the older kids, the only way they really attract people are with ice cream socials and whatnot,” sophomore Manasvi Noronha said. “I feel like for Valentine’s Day they should have just put all their effort into a dance for the whole school, because we only have one dance a year for all grades and it’s a lot more appealing to all the ages rather than something like a ring pop proposal.”

Seah said that next year, ASB plans to take the events from this year and improve them immensely.

“For example, I mean we can buy more Ring pops, or more Polaroid photos, then more people can take photos,” Seah said. “And I think just getting feedback from this year really helps next year. We really want to get hedgehogs for valgrams as well, so we’ll also prioritize getting like the high quality, really appealing stuffed animals.”

ASB also hopes to continue encouraging student participation in activities like matchomatics, now that they have gotten it approved by administrators, according to Seah.

“I think for matchomatics now that we’ve gone I’m gonna prove for one year, I think we can definitely do it next year,” Seah said.