Summer Office Hours: Tuesday – Thursdays 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM (Appointments by Request)
Office hours: Mon-Thu 7:45 AM-4:00 PM | Fri 7:45 AM-2:00 PM
(916) 481-2300
Summer Office Hours: Tuesday – Thursdays 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM (Appointments by Request)
Office hours: Mon-Thu 7:45 AM-4:00 PM | Fri 7:45 AM-2:00 PM
(916) 481-2300
There’s a small mountain of research on what actually helps kids feel like they belong at school, and it usually comes down to something simpler than you’d expect. A 2025 study in the Early Childhood Education Journal followed young children through their first days of school and found that when kids described feeling like they belonged, they almost always pointed to the same three things: places they recognized, routines they already knew, and faces they’d seen before (Hudson, Allen, & Bozorg, 2025). That’s basically the whole philosophy behind how Sacramento Adventist Academy runs its first day of school, and it’s why the morning has started the exact same way for more than a decade now.
Here’s what Carmichael-area families should know about how the first day of school works at Sacramento Adventist Academy.
Every first day of school at SAA begins the same way, with the whole campus gathered outside for the flag raising ceremony before anyone sets foot in a classroom. That’s true whether you’re a three year old starting preschool or a senior walking onto campus for the last “first day” of your life. The tradition goes back to 2015, so by now it’s older than most of our current students’ memories of school itself.
There’s something to be said for doing the exact same thing on purpose, every single year. That kind of repetition is what settles a nervous kid down on the first morning of a new school year, and a ceremony that hasn’t changed in over a decade gives every student on campus the same starting line, no matter how old they are.
“The flag raising sets the tone before we’ve said a word about academics,” said Matthew Jakobsons, Principal of Sacramento Adventist Academy. “It reminds every student, whether it’s their first year here or their last, that they’re walking onto a campus that’s been waiting for them specifically.”
Once the ceremony wraps up, the day looks pretty different depending on how old you are, and that’s by design. Preschool and elementary parents walk their kids all the way to the classroom door, which for a lot of families means a hug, maybe a few tears in the hallway, and a noticeably quieter car ride home once mom or dad heads back to the parking lot.
Middle schoolers spend their morning on the practical stuff, finding the locker that’s actually theirs, meeting the teacher whose homeroom they’ll sit in all year, and getting a sense of how the schedule works now that they’re not in elementary school anymore. High schoolers barely slow down by comparison. They’re picking up textbooks, sitting through a general assembly or two, and walking into their first class of the semester, all in the same morning.
It makes sense once you think about what each age group actually needs on day one. A five year old needs someone to hold their hand and walk them somewhere safe. A seventeen year old needs to feel like the year is already moving, and at that point in high school, it is.
Ask a parent who’s weighing a private Christian school against the local public school district what they’re really trying to figure out, and it usually comes down to test scores or tuition on the surface, but underneath that it’s really about whether their kid is going to be known there, by name and by personality. A school-wide flag ceremony, transitions built around what each grade actually needs, and staff who personally walk a kindergartner to her classroom door add up to a pretty good answer.
That’s a big part of why families choose SAA in the first place. It’s a preschool through 12th grade campus small enough that the first day ends up feeling like a community picking back up where it left off in June, more than it feels like paperwork and a locker assignment.
SAA opens every school year with a theme, and it shows up everywhere: chapel talks, classroom conversations, hallway posters, all the way through graduation in June. This year’s theme is “God Is For Us,” and it was introduced this morning for the first time. For the first time in SAA’s history, the theme also arrived with an original song written specifically for it, which played as the soundtrack to this year’s first-day-of-school video.
We’ll have more to share about how that song came together in a future article, including where families can find it once it’s released on Spotify and Apple Music. For now, all you need to know is that it played this morning for a campus full of kids ranging from preschoolers who had just met their teacher to seniors starting their last first day of high school.
The first day sets a tone, but it’s really the first week or two that determines how smoothly a kid settles into a new grade. Keeping bedtime and morning routines roughly the same as they were over the summer helps more than almost anything else parents can do, and it lines up with exactly what that belonging research found: familiar routines matter, and they don’t stop mattering once a kid walks through the classroom door.
For younger kids, a short and calm goodbye at drop-off beats a long one every time, even if it doesn’t feel that way in the moment. For middle and high schoolers, skip the “how was your day” question, since it tends to get a one-word answer back. Ask something more specific instead, like who they sat with at lunch or what their homeroom teacher seems like, and you’ll usually get a real conversation out of it.
Traditions like the flag raising ceremony are part of what makes the first day of school at Sacramento Adventist Academy feel less like the start of something new and more like coming back to something familiar. If you’d like to see it for yourself, we’d love to have you visit campus. You can also learn more about admissions at SAA or give us a call at (916) 481-2300.
Sacramento Adventist Academy is a preschool through 12th grade school in Carmichael, California, guided by seven schoolwide learner outcomes: Embracing Positive Citizenship, Knowing and Following Jesus, Living Healthy and Balanced Lives, Thinking Critically and With Curiosity, Demonstrating Grit and Effort, Nurturing Lifelong Relationships, and Pursuing Achievement and Growth. Learn more about enrollment at SAA and our mission and values.
