A little over a month into school, students are still adjusting to online schooling.  During a virtual Back to School Night on Sept. 16, Saratoga parents got to experience all of what their kids have been going through the past month and also learn about their student’s classes and teachers.

On Aug. 25, principal Greg Louie notified the community that Back to School Night would be moved from Aug. 26 to Sept. 16 due to the challenges that teachers were facing from wildfires in the Santa Cruz Mountains and the poor air quality and power outages that followed.

During the virtual Back to School Night, parents attended 10-minute meetings for each of their child’s classes. 

According to Louie, teachers used these synchronous 10 minute sessions to show how students are engaging with the curricula, how grading and assessments function in a virtual setting and when and how teachers are accessible for additional support. 

Senior Shama Gupta’s father Nagesh Gupta said he appreciated that the school had a Back to School Night despite the circumstances and said that the system was not hard to navigate.

Although he liked getting to see his student’s teachers and see what they were going to do, there were lots of fun parts of Back to School Night that Gupta could not do this year with the virtual setting.

“What I missed most was meeting other students’ parents, going from classroom to classroom, figuring out where all the classrooms are and just having the feeling of going to high school,” Gupta said.

Despite the challenges of a virtual Back to School Night, Louie is proud of the work that his teaching staff did for the event.

“I hope that parents were impressed with the hard work the teachers are doing to provide rigorous and relevant instruction despite the non-traditional circumstances,” Louie said.