The first Homecoming Spirit Night on Oct. 10 kicked off a week-long celebration leading up to Homecoming on Oct. 15. Students volunteered to decorate the campus inspired by this year’s horror movie Homecoming theme while clubs raised money by selling items like refreshments. 

“It was a really good start to Homecoming because we were able to add a little more design and more color around our school just to show more hype around it and bring more interest towards Homecoming,” sophomore class president and sophomore Mahat Chandra said. 

Freshmen recreated the portal to the Other World from “Coraline” with PVC pipes and colorful tissue paper while sophomores taped long blue streamers to the second floor of the 1000 school building to match the ocean atmosphere of “Jaws.” Juniors hung fake missing posters and red balloons from “It,” and seniors constructed a hall of mirrors to replicate the spooky funhouse from “Us.”

“Our goal with Spirit Night is a way to involve the whole community in Homecoming,” ASB co-adviser Kate Avery said. “I think traditionally, it’s kind of been this like ‘Oh, that’s just an ASB thing,’ but it’s not. The whole idea about Homecoming is that it’s a school thing, so this is really an opportunity for Portola students to get involved without necessarily being in ASB or on Class Council.”

Spirit Night was also the second club outreach event of the year, following Club Kickoff in September. Five clubs fundraised at the event to raise money for their cause, according to Children’s Hospital of Orange County club president and senior Juel Wettstein.

“Spirit Night gave us an opportunity to raise money to fund these things that we’re trying to do with our clubs like community service,” Wettstein said. “In CHOC club we will use our club funds for when we go to RMH, which is the Ronald McDonald House in Orange County, where we serve the families of the children who are in the CHOC hospital. So our money goes towards feeding them.”

With the success of this year’s Spirit Night, ASB hopes that the event can become a long-standing tradition, according to Avery.

“We are starting this new tradition that we hope to carry over for year after year after year,” Avery said. “There are a lot of things that we learned from this so that we can just keep growing, getting bigger and getting better each year.”