Back to School Night simulates ordinary school day for parents

The parking lot overflowed with cars the evening of Aug. 27, as hundreds of parents attended the annual Back to School Night. Following their students’ class schedules, parents frantically searched for room numbers before the late bell rang.

The night kicked off around 5:30 p.m., with different clubs and organizations hosting booths in the quad. Showing parents their mission and purpose, each group stood hopefully as parents signed up to help or donated money. The M-SET Robotics  team showed off its prized robot, dubbed “Nessie.” Senior M-SET president Kabir Manghnani said that presenting at Back to School Night was an effective way to reach parents.

“We’ve got a lot of ways on campus to reach the student population, but we don’t have as much access to the parents,” Manghnani said.

In addition to M-SET, the Associated Student Body (ASB) sold school apparel, Media Arts Program (MAP) students showed parents the MAP Lab’s functions and speech and debate members handed out flyers to recruit their children.

After getting an idea of what the different clubs and groups had to offer, parents settled down in folding chairs and lunch tables to listen to a brief introduction speech from principal Paul Robinson and several other administrators.

As Robinson dismissed the parents to the first-period class, they then began journeying into the halls to meet their students’ new teachers in their respective classrooms. They spent ten minutes in each classroom getting to know how their child would be spending their school year.

LINK Crew members, who were identifiable by their brightly colored “Toy Story” themed T-shirts, were scattered across the campus, helping to direct lost or confused parents to their intended classrooms.

The evening ended around 9 p.m., as Robinson announced over the intercom that it was “time to let the teachers go” and called senior parents to the cafeteria for a Grad Night meeting. The parents’ night at school came to a close, and teachers prepared their classrooms for their actual students.