In a sight that was common in the past couple of years, small groups of students, led by assistant principal Matthew Torrens, spent an hour on Blue Day afternoons picking up trash, moving desks and chairs and doing other campus beautification efforts as punishment for having too many tardies and other disciplinary issues.
That punishment, called Treasure Toga, isn’t taking place this year.
Instead, a more traditional detention system has been reinstated. The reason for this change? To make it easier for both administrators and students, Torrens said.
For the past two years, students with five or more tardies were assigned two days of Treasure Toga, which lasted an hour and took place during eighth period.
The return to traditional detention stems from logistical challenges, particularly scheduling conflicts for administrators overseeing the program. Both Los Gatos and Saratoga High typically assign an assistant principal to manage attendance at that site. Last year, assistant principal Kristen Cunningham took on this role at the school, working alongside assistant principal Amy Gaustad at Los Gatos on anything regarding attendance.
After adopting a new attendance handbook last year, the administration and attendance technician Mandy Armes decided to make some adjustments to the school’s detention policy.
“It was Mr. Torren’s brilliant idea to do Treasure Toga as a creative and productive way to improve the campus through detention,” Cunningham said. “But as you can imagine, as an administrator, you can’t always be available at that set time. So we decided as a team to put it out as an extra duty assignment with our human resources department to have the same person every time to supervise detention.”
Under the new system, detention takes place in the cafeteria, where students have seat time to do quiet, productive activities for an hour under the supervision of Special Education teacher Brian Elliott. When needed, Torrens and maintenance operation lead Henry Arellanes can still pull students out of detention to help with projects around campus, offering incentives like early dismissal for participation.
“When we did Treasure Toga, there were times when we didn’t have a project, which left students with nothing to do,” Cunningham said. “Now, it’s on an as-needed basis and when Mr. Torrens is available, it’s kind of a happy medium.”
Detention typically occurs on the Blue Days of Red Weeks — weeks with 3 Red Days and 2 Blue Days — and offers students the choice between the two days. When the school did Treasure Toga, students were required to attend both of the given days. This switch offers students — many of whom have extracurriculars and other after-school responsibilities — some flexibility.
Certain policies remain unchanged — missing detention results in an even more onerous punishment: Saturday school, which is from 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. and supervised by campus supervisor Archie Ljepava. Furthermore, students who skip Saturday school are placed on a “no-go” list, barring them from purchasing prom tickets.
From an organizational standpoint, Cunningham said the switch to detention has streamlined the process as intended. This year, they also implemented 5-Star Students — an app that checks students in — which has significantly improved efficiency compared to the previous Google Form system used for Treasure Toga.
Elliott also sees the change as beneficial by providing a structured but manageable consequence for tardiness.
“My role is just to ensure students stay for the full period of time and using tutorial terminology, doing something ‘academically relevant’ or ‘socially, emotionally appropriate,’” Elliott said. “I think students prefer this setup as it’s a little bit less effort than going out and doing projects.”
