March 2023 — Silver Chips Print

Playing like the pros

By Zachary Williamson Sports Columnist

Feb. 14—Blair’s tennis tryouts

start in two weeks. Last year, I barely missed a varsity starting spot. I want to make the most of this upcoming competitive tennis season, seeing as it might be my last. That means getting to play in a starting position, which will be tough considering there are only 10 spots for approximately 30 students. What can I do to compete with Blair’s best? Learn to play like the pros,

of course! Well, maybe not exactly like the pros—more like a 5’7’’, can’t-do-a-serve-to-save-his-life version of them.

For this edition of “Participation Trophy,” I’m going to be recreating an iconic tennis point in the hopes of improving my technical skills.

It’s the semifinal of the 2009 US Open at Arthur Ashe stadium—a showdown between two tennis greats, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. Federer has taken the first two sets, hoping to reach the

final and win his sixth straight US Open. The match is deep into the third set. Federer needs two more points to win the match; Djokovic needs four to stay alive.

It’s Djokovic’s serve this game, giving him the advantage. He sends a rocket straight down the iwnside. Federer jumps at the ball and returns it with a slice, slowing it down. Djokovic puts it in the far corner, and Federer extends to reach it. He makes the shot, but stumbles.

see ZACH’S COLUMN page F1

Keeping teachers on track

By Mandy Guo Staff Writer

For a teacher, tenure is one of the most desirable employment protections to secure. Contrary to popular belief, tenured teachers are not immune to being fired, but tenure does provide due process and access to an impartial body. The hearing and jury necessary for termination of a tenured teacher on average lasts 830 days and costs

$313,000. Some argue that these costs can dissuade many principals and administrators from terminating teachers, even if their performance is declining.

In Maryland, teachers must teach for three consecutive years in the same school system to gain tenure. They are then evaluated every three to five years, depending on the length of their tenure. Between evaluation cycles, some tenured teachers fall out of step with the evolution of teaching methods and student assessment practices, which can lead to ineffective learning environments for students. To address this, MCPS has tailored a department to help underperforming teachers.

The Professional Growth Systems (PGS) department puts both new and underperforming teach-

Closed campus

Principal Johnson responded to an anonymous student email criticizing Blair’s closed campus policy, citing student crime and defending security measures.

ers through an observation, evaluation, and improvement process in order to help them become effective, up-to-standard educators. The process begins with a typical teacher evaluation, which is conducted once per semester during a teacher’s evaluation year. During the observation, which lasts at least 30 minutes, a school administrator, resource teacher, or department head will sit in for a lesson and observe how the teacher interacts in the classroom—whether or not the teacher is engaging all members of the class, creating a positive

see PGS page D4

OPINIONS

Bathroom doors

The removal of bathroom doors was meant to protect students, but instead deprived them of a longstanding safe space. Meanwhile, illicit activities continue, largely unhindered. B3

Modern witches

By Teddy Curtin and Cate Sauri Staff Writers

Wallace Heuchuck, 17, takes a walk in the woods on a brisk fall afternoon. When he sees a rusty orange leaf drift to the ground and a black cat scamper across the trail, he knows Bastet, the Egyptian goddess of cats, is reaching out to him.

Heuchuck is a modern day witch.

As a child, Heuchuck’s parents advised him to look to nature and the elements for spiritual healing.

As he got older, this practice developed into his form of witchcraft. “My parents’ solutions for things were, ‘Oh, you’re sad, go write poetry, go talk to the grass’... and I thought it was ridiculous when I was little,” he says. “And then I actually got it.” Heuchuck realized later on that he was practicing witchcraft, or Wicca, the religion of modern-day witchcraft, which draws from Celtic, Germanic, and other pagan traditions and emphasizes a deep respect for nature in its worship.

By noticing patterns in the world around him, Heuchuck was practicing the Wiccan tradition of reaching out to gods and goddesses. He can recognize the presence of Gaia, the goddess of nature, or

see WITCHES page E5

MARDI GRAS ON THE POTOMAC On Feb. 18, The Wharf DC celebrated Mardi Gras with a dance party, fireworks show, and parade that featured floats from nearby businesses.

PHOTOS BY JONATHAN CUMBLIDGE

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Breaking down the budget

MCPS spending jumps 8.1 percent for Fiscal Year 2024

By Della Baer and Nora Pierce Staff Writers

Overview

On Dec. 19, MCPS Superintendent of Schools Dr. Monifa McKnight proposed a recommended operating budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 that totaled $3.15 billion, marking an 8.1 percent growth from FY 2023. The increase will compensate for inflation and new investments in student wellness and early childhood education initiatives.

The growth also accounts for the fact that FY 2024 will be the last year that MCPS benefits from federal COVID-19 relief funding.

In her introduction to the proposed budget, McKnight highlighted the challenges that the school district will face as it loses access to $387.2 million of Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief funding, which paid for summer school programs, tutoring, and mental health resources throughout the pandemic. “There is a funding cliff we must address,” she wrote.

McKnight also partially attributed the budget’s 8.1 percent increase to the county’s growing student body. Total enrollment increased by over 2,300 students for the 2022–2023 school year, marking an upward trend after a two-year decline that saw enrollment dip below 160,000 students for the first time since 2017. The proposed budget sets aside $14.9 million—0.47 percent of the total—to support this growth.

On Feb. 9, McKnight presented the BOE with an adjusted budget proposal informed by community feedback and new data on student math and literacy rates in MCPS. McKnight’s adjustments did not increase the total spending of her budget proposal, and were instead offset through funding cuts.

The adjusted proposal added 86 educator positions to the original budget, including content supervisors, instructional specialists and coaches, and 40 teachers. These new hires will support math and reading literacy investments aimed at addressing achievement gaps and improving graduation readiness.

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future

The proposed budget includes spending that aligns with the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, a bill passed by the Maryland General Assembly in 2021 that will increase Maryland education funding by a total of $3.8 billion over the course of the next decade. The Blueprint includes revised college and career readiness (CCR) standards that move Maryland past using standardized test scores as the only measure of CCR, increase access to post-CCR pathways, and provide support in the form of a program of study for students not meeting standards by the end of 10th grade. The distribution of funds to counties each fiscal year is based on the gradual phase-in of Blueprint programs and a formula that factors in the “characteristics, needs, and accomplishments of each student.”

MCPS’ estimated budget revenue for FY 2024 includes $39 million from state Blueprint aid. Included in McKnight’s proposed budget is $3.4 million that will reduce achievement barriers by covering all AP and IB exam fees in full, facilitating growing student participation in AP courses and meeting funding requirements outlined in the Blueprint’s pathway for CCR.

The Blueprint legislation also prescribes access to preschool as a critical program that will save money and resources down the line. “More robust early childhood education for all [should] eliminate the need for a lot of enrichment services in [future] years, because we won’t have as many students [who] aren’t meeting [literacy and math] benchmarks,” BOE member Lynne Harris said in an interview with Silver Chips.

Student wellness

McKnight’s budget recommendation sets aside $49.3 million for the Office of Well-Being, Learning, and Achievement, which manages school psychologists and other student health and wellness services— an increase of over $815,000 from the current fiscal year. This extra funding will be used to expand mental health support services to 68 additional schools through partnerships with external mental health services providers.

represents MCPS educators and has been bargaining for higher teacher salaries. Thus, the money is subject to change until the board and MCEA complete negotiations. Of the $119 million, $111 million will go toward the salaries of employees represented by the three MCPS employee unions: MCEA, Service Employee International Union, and Montgomery County Association of Administrators and Principals.

Under MCPS’ present salary model, teachers progress through 19 pay grades starting at the first tier, which ranges from $63,495 to $73,661 in annual pay depending on a teacher’s level of postsecondary education. Teachers move up one tier annually, which means those who begin working in MCPS later on in their careers cannot receive the highest possible salary before retirement or will only do so for a few years.

Martin explained that annual pay grade increases and Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) payments—which adjust salaries for

an educator,” Martin said.

Martin believes that the county’s salary shortcomings threaten its capacity to recruit and retain top educators. “We think [the proposed budget] is not going to keep [MCPS] competitive with other [school] districts,” Martin said. “It fails to address the cost of living increases that we’ve seen over the past year that we have to deal with, that everybody’s having to deal with.”

These salary disagreements follow a countywide deficit of educators exacerbated by the pandemic. “I think that there’s an overall problem of teacher shortage nationally, and that is because teachers are underpaid relative to other professions,” Martin said. “So we’re not really just looking to be competitive against other local school systems, because teachers are leaving the profession altogether.”

In an interview with Silver Chips, BOE Vice President Shebra Evans said that the board is exploring alternatives to salary increases in order to address its staffing shortfall. “We

MCPS Coordinator of Psychological Services Michelle Palmer believes that the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the need for services that treat student and staff well-being. “Our attempt to expand has been brought on largely because of the understanding that we need more mental health supports in school [and] because of the ongoing need of mental health supports for those who experienced trauma during the pandemic,” she said.

According to Palmer, outsourcing these services makes expanding resources to more students countywide possible. “It’s never going to be enough to just have what we have in the [county],” Palmer said. “We need to partner with outside agencies.”

Teacher salary conflict

The Blueprint for Maryland’s Future also includes a commitment to attracting and retaining high-quality teachers through improved training and preparation as well as equitable and competitive salaries. The recommended budget for FY 2024 includes a net increase of $119 million for MCPS employee salaries and benefits. This sum has spurred conflict with the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA), which

inflation—were set to roll out in July 2022 but did not begin until December, which meant teacher paychecks were short one pay grade and their COLA for months. The July–December pay grade and COLA money owed to educators is now being added to next year’s salaries as a lump sum payment that constitutes part of the $119 million increase in McKnight’s budget proposal. Because of this, Martin feels that this portion of the budget is not a legitimate raise, but rather overdue wages being paid late.

Furthermore, McKnight’s proposed budget for FY 2024 adds only the overdue $119 million to teacher pay, and does not move each educator’s salary to the next grade. “Right now in negotiations, MCPS is only offering us what amounts to a 3.35 percent cost of living adjustment. They’re going to freeze steps is what they’re saying,” MCEA President Jennifer Martin said in an interview with Silver Chips.

In addition to the resumption of pay grade progression, MCEA is bargaining for a compression of steps so that teachers receive higher salaries earlier on and maximize lifetime earnings. “It doesn’t seem appropriate that it should take so long for someone to really be considered at the top of their game as

are not going to be able to pay our way out of the teacher shortage, but I’m looking forward to the additional creative ideas we’ll come up with to be able to attract more teachers

to the profession,” she said.

Evans cited one example of a creative solution—“Grow Your Own” programs—which attract and recruit the county’s current students to return to work in the school district. “We’re encouraging… current MCPS students to go into the teacher profession,” she said. “We can build our own pipeline.”

On Feb. 23, the BOE tentatively approved the proposed budget in a unanimous vote. The BOE will vote for the final adoption of the budget in June after the Montgomery County Council passes a final county budget in May.

It doesn’t seem appropriate that it should take so long for someone to really be considered at the top of their game as an educator.

JENNIFER MARTIN

GRAPHIC BY DELLA BAER AND NORA PIERCE | DATA COURTESTY OF MCPS

Blair doubles down on closed campus policy

By Sachini Adikari and Sasha Vesensky Staff Writers

On Jan. 13, a group of anonymous students emailed Principal Renay Johnson criticizing Blair’s closed campus policy and calling for an end to the rule.

The students wrote that closed campus policies are not instituted by MCPS and that other schools allow open campus lunches. They also contested the argument that University Boulevard is a dangerous road. “Although MBHS is surrounded by 3 major highways on all sides, most students only leave through University BLVD, which is a relatively safer highway to cross,” the email read. “Additionally, many other schools in the county like Richard Montgomery HS and BCC HS all allow students to cross similarly sized roads in order to have their own open-campus policy.”

Johnson shared the students’ original email, as well as her response, with the entire Blair staff, as she wanted to openly address the concerns brought up and avoid speculation. “The reason why I copied all the staff and the PTA is so that everyone would hear the same message. If it would have gone unanswered, I think rumors [would] spread and things [would] get out of hand,” she said in an interview with Silver Chips.

However, the anonymous students objected to her decision to share their email. “We felt like people were going to spam us over the emails because I’ve seen [that teachers are] sharing that email,” one of the anonymous students said in an interview with Silver Chips.

It turns into loitering, it’s not really ordering food. It’s just some place for them to go sometimes.

rameters of not only being in the school but being part of a school community.”

In her response to the anonymous email, Johnson expressed concern over the lack of adult oversight an open campus policy would entail. “School safety is our top priority, and there is no staff supervision off campus,” she wrote.

She added that school jurisdiction ends at the edge of Blair’s campus and the school cannot guarantee student security across the street. “When I walk [into] McDonald’s right now… I’m a citizen. That’s

Woodmoor Pastry Shop owner Jamie Gray mentioned that students sometimes loiter and leave trash around his store. “[There is] smoking pot in the stairwells, [fighting] in alleyways, stuff going on in cars,” he said. “It’s just trashing in the parking lot.”

Christine Caltabiano, an employee at Santucci’s Deli, has also witnessed idling and disruptive students. “Occasionally, kids get too loud. It turns into loitering, it’s not really ordering food. It’s just some place for them to go sometimes,” she said.

kids are out here,” he said.

As a result of these issues, a number of businesses in Four Corners will increase security measures to guard against students who misbehave. “Some business owners have shared that they will hire police/security or close during our lunch period because of negative students’ behaviors in their stores/restaurants,” Johnson’s email read.

Nevertheless, many Woodmoor businesses would like to be able to safely welcome Blair students. “It’s [about] trying to find a happy balance, because a lot of businesses here also depend on the money that the kids bring in,” Caltabiano said. “We notice a difference in the days’ [profits] when the kids haven’t been here.”

CHRISTINE CALTABIANO

Blair has maintained a closed campus policy since it moved to its current location in 1998. According to a 1998 article by The Washington Post, safety concerns motivated the rule. “Because [Blair’s new campus] is in one of the busiest intersections in Montgomery County, Four Corners, school officials decided it would be safer to keep students on campus all day,” the article read.

25 years later, student safety is still an issue, according to Johnson. “I’m always thinking about my Blazers and what’s best for them,” she said. “Sometimes people want to do what they want to do without understanding the pa-

not my establishment. We don’t have staff that can supervise students off-campus,” she said.

Security Team Leader Adrian Kelly supports Johnson’s stance on having a closed campus policy to maintain student safety. “[The policy is in place because of] safety issues from things that happen in the community. It’s our administration and principal’s vision and that’s just our policy. We have to have [students] stay on campus,” he said.

This school year, administration implemented stricter security measures to prevent students from leaving campus, including security guards standing outside of the building at lunch every day. The severity of consequences for leaving campus increases with the number of offenses.

“[For the first offense,] we’ll [give] them an off-campus letter… That student will have to bring that note back signed,” Kelly said. “For the second… they have to work with one of our specialists… and they’ll have to bring the note and sign it again. And [a] third offense takes it to another level, [like inschool intervention].”

Many businesses near Blair are concerned that students will cause disruptions if they are allowed off campus during school hours.

Student crimes are also a major concern. “You have business owners who say, ‘My business has been vandalized. Students have come in and verbally abused my staff,’” Johnson said. “We’ve had CVS call me and the police bring students back over in handcuffs because they’ve been arrested for shoplifting.”

This year, Woodmoor Market owner Paul Cho banned students from entering his store during the school day for the first time because of the recent spike in student vandalization. “[Students are] not doing anything good,” he said. “[They’re] causing trouble.”

According to Gray, Woodmoor Pastry Shop will continue to allow student business during the school day as long as students are mindful. “I don’t mind the students having an open lunch as long as they’re respectful of the community,” he said. “We support the Blair community, we just want reciprocal support from them.”

We support the Blair community, we just want reciprocal support from them.

JAMIE GRAY

Many Woodmoor establishments benefit from student customers and hire students as well. “During the summertime [and] spring break, the businesses miss [students]. I walk over there they’re like, ‘Hey, Mrs. Johnson, where are your students?’” Johnson said. “They hire a lot of our students too. We want to have a good relationship so they can keep hiring our students.”

Compiled by Raunak Banerjee Staff Writer

Baltimore power grid conspirators arrested

On Feb. 3, Florida resident Brandon Russell and Maryland resident Sarah Clendaniel were arrested and charged with conspiring to attack Baltimore’s power grid substations with mylar balloons. Russell allegedly planned to release the metal-coated balloons to disrupt power transformers, while Clendaniel would shoot anyone who tried to stop them.

The criminal complaint against Russell and Clendaniel released by the Department of Justice also revealed various encrypted texts, which included maps of potential substation targets and a video of Clendaniel wearing assault gear with a swastika insignia.

Russell is the founder of the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi terrorist organization with ties to infrastructure-based domestic terrorism. An anonymous FBI informant who had been in contact with the accused confirmed that the plans were racially motivated.

The majority of Baltimore’s citizens are Black, and the entire city relies on grid infrastructure. Officials say that any major disruption has the potential to leave hundreds of thousands without power.

If convicted, both suspects will face 20 years in federal prison on domestic terrorism charges.

MCPS bus driver convicted

On March 30, the Montgomery County Circuit Court (MCCC) will sentence former bus driver Etienne Kabongo to up to 40 years in prison for sexually abusing four special needs students who were passengers on his bus. Kabongo pleaded guilty to two charges of second-degree rape and two charges of sexual assault on a minor in January 2020, but argued that he should not be held criminally responsible due to alleged insanity. An MCCC jury overturned the insanity plea on Feb. 9, 2023.

Kabongo had been a bus driver for more than a decade at the time of his crimes. After a 12-year-old victim reported his abuse in July 2018, MCPS immediately fired Kabongo, and he was promptly taken into custody.

SSIMS safety threats

Silver Spring International Middle School (SSIMS) will bolster its security measures and begin renovating its campus after county council members were alerted of several incidents on campus.

Due to a lack of security and the school’s proximity to a public bus station, public bus passengers have regularly trespassed on SSIMS grounds. On Nov. 10, a convicted burglar entered the building and stole classroom materials before fleeing the school. The day after, an interaction between a trespasser and a staff member led to Principal Karen Bryant issuing a statement condemning trespassing.

Students have also brought weapons into the school building.

Cho has also noticed a decrease in business that he attributes to the presence of students. “[Business] has slowed down. Customers don’t come around here [because]

Regardless of how school administration decides to move forward on the closed campus policy, Kelly is prepared to support Johnson’s decisions. “[Security is] prepared to assist [Principal Johnson]. Right now, we are not looking for [the policy to change],” he said. “If it [is] ever going to change, we’re… going to be here supporting Mrs. Johnson as well as the school.”

In one incident, a student brought a BB gun, which discharged and shot another student but did not seriously injure them. A schoolwide lockdown followed the shot. SSIMS has also seen student fights, some of which have escalated to knife fights.

Other community concerns stem from the school’s unrenovated campus. Issues include rain water damage, air quality problems, mold, asbestos, and unfinished renovations.

Sometimes people want to do what they want to do without understanding the parameters of... being part of a school community.

RENAY JOHNSON

You have business owners who say, ‘My business has been vandalized. Students have come in and verbally abused my staff.’

RENAY JOHNSON

LUCIA WANG

$2 million student leadership program put on hold

MCPS delays renewal of contract for The Leader in Me

By Julia Lian Staff Writer

As students faced heightened mental and social health challenges in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, MCPS funneled millions of dollars into wellness resources, including The Leader in Me (TLIM) program. Produced by professional coaching company Franklin Covey Education, TLIM was purchased by MCPS in May 2021 for approximately $1.8 million. However, nearly two years after adopting the program, many schools have yet to implement its curriculum.

According to Franklin Covey Education, TLIM is an academic model that aims to build leadership and life skills and increase academic achievement. Over 5,000 schools worldwide use the program.

to implement the program during the 2021–2022 school year. Administrators at B-CC struggled with the rigidity of TLIM’s curriculum when they brought it to classrooms. “As we have attempted to implement the program, we have wanted to modify some of the materials and we have been told that they are not modifiable. We would really like to adapt some of the materials to better suit the needs of our population and to make the materials more culturally sensitive,”

B-CC Assistant Principal Vickie Adamson said.

tion for teachers to process. “[The] first day was about teachers [and] applying [the program] to ourselves, which I did find useful. The second day was about how to apply it with students, which I did not, [because] it was like, ‘Here’s a thousand resources, go ahead and look at them,’” she said. “I’m [like] ‘What do you want me to do with this? It’s too much.’”

LIAN

trained [over the summer], but they haven’t done that yet,” Tinsley said. “My understanding from people who have actually done the training is that it was… maybe not the most applicable to high school.”

Compiled by Sela Colavito Staff Writer

On Feb. 6, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck near the border between Turkey and Syria, killing more than 51,000 people and injuring over 105,000. Turkish emergency response crews rescued citizens, many of whom had been trapped underneath rubble for over 100 hours, throughout the next two weeks, before halting most efforts on Feb. 19.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered cash relief to families affected by the quake on Feb. 8 and promised reconstruction of affected areas within one year. Ninety-five countries have offered aid to nations affected by the disaster; the U.S. pledged an initial $85 million and eased sanctions on Turkey. Additionally, the United Nations (UN) World Food Programme is providing $77 million in food for the earthquake victims.

Former Superintendent of Schools

Jack Smith justified the purchase of the original TLIM contract in a 2021 memorandum. “Students will develop competency in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making,” he wrote. Since then, MCPS has decided to pause the use of TLIM beyond this year due to its cost, mixed reviews about its curriculum from students and staff, and a reevaluation of the initial purchase process, according to Board of Education at-large member Lynne Harris in an email to Silver Chips.

Select MCPS schools, including Bethesda-Chevy Chase, were slated

B-CC junior Abby Geyer was not aware of TLIM and explained her frustration about not receiving information on the program. “[The lack of communication regarding TLIM] does seem kind of weird. If [the program is] something that affects me or should affect me or in any way, I would like to know about it,” she said.

In addition to the program’s baseline cost, MCPS held trainings for all teachers to implement TLIM in their classes, spending over $70,000 in teacher wages at each school that adopted the curriculum and even more at larger schools like Blair.

For Appino, the training included overwhelming amounts of informa-

Unlike Appino, English teacher Leigh Tinsley was not trained for TLIM after opting out of the summer training with the intent to participate in a later session. “I have not really been trained in the Leader in Me program at this point… [Blair] said they were going to have some follow-up training for teachers who didn’t get

Tinsley also disagrees with MCPS’ expectations that teachers will be equipped to support student well-being through resources like TLIM without proper preparation. “We need actual, real training on mental health counseling [if] they’re going to expect us to do [help students],” she said. “We are not trained and we are being expected to do work that we have not been trained to do.”

Instead of one-size-fits-all programs like TLIM, Geyer would like to see personalized support materials for each student. “Some of these [issues addressed in advisory period] are such topical problems for people. They might be better helped with mental health support, because they’re all very personal issues. Everyone has their own issues and even if people have the same issue, it has to be dealt with in different ways,” Geyer said.

According to Blair’s internal leadership team, TLIM will debut during an innovation period on March 22.

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Syrian President Bashar Assad claimed that Western countries were “politicizing” the disaster and accused the UN of failing to consider rebel-held areas of northern Syria in need of aid.

Arrests in Brazil over storming of government buildings

On Jan. 8, one week after newly-elected Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn into office, thousands of former President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters attacked the Brazilian presidential palace, Congress, and Supreme Court. Since then, 1,500 rioters have been arrested, along with former Minister of Justice and Public Security Anderson Torres. Torres was fired and accused of a “structured sabotage operation” but denied any involvement in the attack.

In the days following the riots, Brazilian law enforcement dismantled camps set up by Bolsonaro’s supporters roughly four miles away from the government facilities attacked on Jan. 8. World leaders, including President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron, have condemned this attack, with many deeming it “a threat to democracy.”

Western nations send tanks to Ukraine

The United States, United Kingdom, and Germany have announced that they will donate tanks to Ukraine as it pushes back against Russian invasion. The Biden administration pledged to send 31 M1 Abrams tanks to Ukraine on Jan. 25, paving the way for the German Defense Ministry, which previously stated it would only send tanks if the U.S. did so and announced later the same day that it would donate 14 Leopard 2. Germany approved an additional 88 Leopard 1 tanks for donation on Feb. 7. The U.K. also promised 14 of its Challenger 2 tanks on Jan. 17, bringing the first round of tank support for Ukraine to a total of 147 tanks.

Russia characterized this latest show of Western solidarity with Ukraine as “blatant provocation” and diminished the role of the tanks in battle. “These tanks burn like all the rest.”

GRAPHIC BY JULIA

We need actual, real training on mental health counseling [if] they’re going to expect us to do [help students].

LEIGH TINSLEY

We would really like to adapt some of the materials to better suit the needs of our population and to make the materials more culturally sensitive.

VICKIE ADAMSON

By Ava Bedaque News Columnist

Former MCPS student and teacher Kristin Mink was elected last November to represent District 5 on the Montgomery County Council. She spoke with Silver Chips about her new role and priorities for her term. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to run for County Council?

During my time as a teacher, I was also an activist and an organizer on the side, and then I moved into full-time work during the Trump administration. Spending all of your time trying to get elected officials to care more about what the community needs than about how much money the lobbyist who’s coming in the door after me—that certainly will get the wheels turning about how much stronger our legislation would be if we had more people sitting in those elected offices who just genuinely cared about

passing good policy on behalf of the community. So, in Montgomery County, when I saw that we suddenly had numerous vacancies… I knew that it meant that it was an opportunity to potentially not get one new person, but possibly a bunch of folks who would be politically courageous and community-minded.

What are your main policy goals for your term?

One is tenant rights. We are working on a rent stabilization bill which would limit the percentage that a landlord is allowed to increase rent by. Schools are hugely important to me. We’re seeing shortages that are extremely problematic. It impacts teachers’ ability to plan, to grade, to teach, [and] to build relationships with their students. If we don’t offer teachers competitive pay, they are going to go elsewhere. We also need to address housing so that folks who work here are able to live here. Also, we have been having a lot of conversations about fentanyl. We need to be… getting more folks

trained [in administering Narcan], and just getting more Narcan in the schools. Climate is another big issue for me. Montgomery County has a pretty aggressive climate action plan, but we are not currently taking the steps we need to meet the numbers that have been set.

What

are the types of budget decisions that would help improve Montgomery County’s approach to climate change?

Ensuring that our developments are not contributing to urban sprawl [and] that we are finding ways to ensure that we are building housing in places that are close to transit and to walkable, bikeable pathways. [Also,] maintaining and expanding our tree canopy [and] addressing heat islands.

How would you plan to address rising crime in Montgomery County?

Police are one piece of the public safety landscape but they are far from the only piece… Their primary job is not a preventative one. There are a lot of other preventative measures that need to be in place. Funding after school programs is an example of a measure that people might not think of as a public safety measure, but when you have really well-funded after school and before school programs that can accommodate a lot of students, that dramatically impacts [crime]. One of the things that we want to do is to free up police time so that they are focused on things

that are most appropriate for police to be responding to: violent crimes. We do have crisis response teams. However, there are so few of them that police respond, still, to almost all of the mental health calls, including the ones that are nonviolent and could be handled by a civilian team. We need to staff [the crisis response teams] up so that they are able to be as responsive across the entire county as quickly as police officers are when there are mental health calls.

What do you think the County Council should do to protect and advance LGBTQ rights?

I think that the public messaging just needs to be a lot clearer and stronger in support of the LGBTQIA+ community and especially the trans and nonbinary community. I have spoken with leadership at MCPS about that because I don’t think that their messages of support—though well intended— have been clear and strong enough. Also, looking for ways to make our spaces and our infrastructure more inclusive. There was a bill that was passed by the previous council, Bill 422, that requires there to be a gender-inclusive or gender-neutral bathroom in [newly built public] spaces. However, we don’t really have a great roll-out plan for that now. Just passing the bill sends a positive statement, but the change is not actually going to happen if we don’t follow through.

Now that you’re a council member, do you ever find it difficult to balance your

activism with the need for compromise or the practical realities of being a politician?

The messaging I would use as an activist is different from the messaging that I would use as a council member, and it’s not because my values have changed, and I’m not aiming for a different goal, but the audience is different, and so it changes the strategy. Sometimes on the activism side... you need to use more over-the-top language, because otherwise, nobody will listen at all. As an elected [official], once we’re talking about it, we already have the platform, [and] the conversation’s already in the public sphere. The goal is to explain what this looks like in a policy sense and explain how that would benefit the community.

Rising gun violence prompts police station proposal

By Talia Egnal Staff Writer

On Dec. 28, in response to recent high-profile crimes in Downtown Silver Spring, County Executive Marc Elrich recommended that the Montgomery County Council consider building a new, seventh county police station in Silver Spring.

The crimes include a series of shootings that captured the public’s attention. Two separate incidents occurred less than one hour from each other on New Year’s Day. Though neither resulted in deaths, one occurred at the Summit Hills parking lot, the site of the fatal Dec. 2, 2022 shooting of 29-year-old Nathaniel Potts. The Summit Hills complex is 2.5 miles away from Blair’s campus and less than half a mile away from the Silver Spring Metro Station.

in a Downtown Silver Spring parking garage. In the aftermath of the shooting, neighboring districts funneled resources and officers to the Silver Spring area.

The increase in police presence during that time was a direct response to the shooting, according to Police District 3 Commander for the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) Captain David McBain, whose district includes Downtown Silver Spring. “When we had that homicide at the end of last year… I put an additional 12 to 14 police officers in Downtown Silver Spring during every day of the week,” McBain said in an interview with Silver Chips.

Other incidents also occurred in the following weeks. On Jan. 8, a shooting at a White Oak gas station left a 61-year-old Shell worker dead. A Jan. 10 stabbing at the McDonald’s on Colesville Road left three injured, while another two days later near Edgewood Neighborhood Park injured one. All of these incidents, including the shooting of Charles Reynolds, occurred within seven miles of Blair’s campus.

have a full-fledged police station on Sligo Avenue, the building closed in 2014 after over 50 years of service. Now, Police District 3 is headquartered in White Oak, 4.6 miles away from Downtown Silver Spring.

vately made firearms—unregulated, untraceable guns otherwise known as ghost guns—and increased circulation of firearms in general have exacerbated this issue.

“In 2022, we seized approximately 1,200 firearms, and of the 1,200 firearms, over 100 of them were [ghost guns],” McBain explained. “Silver Spring officers alone seized 49 ghost guns… [which] lends itself to the

However, any new station to combat this rise would face difficulties with staffing. Nationally, a wave of police retirements and resignations has sparked a shortage of available officers, and MCPD has felt its impact. As of January, the department sat at eight percent below its staffing goals. “We’re sorely short the number of police officers we would need to patrol downcounty… Montgomery County Police are 129 police officers short,”

Another notable crime was the murder of Charles Reynolds, a 62-year-old father of three former Blair students, on Dec. 21, 2022

Downtown Silver Spring currently does not have its own police station, but rather a substation on Georgia Avenue with limited services and officers. “The fire department is on the first floor. Police are on the second floor. But it’s really a substation: it doesn’t have desk clerks, it doesn’t have holding cells, it doesn’t operate like a police station,” McBain said.

Though Silver Spring used to

member Kate Stewart represents Council District 4, which includes Silver Spring and Takoma Park. She notes that while violent crimes have been decreasing in her dis trict, guns have become more prev alent, making domestic incidents deadlier. “Any violent crimes are down… [Most] violence [was] com mitted by people who know each other,” Stewart said in an interview with Silver Chips. “We should talk about the proliferation of guns. And that’s not just a Silver Spring, Montgomery Coun ty, or Maryland issue. That issue is across the coun try.”

deed risen both statewide and nationwide. 78 percent of all homicides in Maryland from 2015 to 2019 involved a gun. According to McBain, a rise in pri

In the place of a new police station, other safety measures have been proposed to mitigate violent crime in Downtown Silver Spring. veiled his “Late Night Business Safety Plan,” mented, would ter midnight to ty plan to the proval. Failure to comply could result in daily fines

creased security staff, better outdoor lighting, and 24-hour lance. The bill was introduced to the Council on Feb. 14 and won early support from Stewart and Montgomery County Chief of

We should talk about the proliferation of guns. And that’s not just a Silver Spring, Montgomery County, or Maryland issue. That issue is across the country.

STEWART

COURTESY OF KRISTIN MINK

MONTGOMERY COUNTY

COUNCIL Councilmember Kristin Mink represents County District 5.

ELIZA COOKE

In 2022, we seized approximately 1,200 firearms, and of the 1,200 firearms, over 100 of them were [ghost guns].

DAVID MCBAIN

Is ChatGPT beneficial for high school education?

NO YES

ChatGPT aids high school education via personalized and accessible learning, improving critical thinking and digital skills.

By ChatGPT Guest Writer AN OPINION

ChatGPT robs students of the opportunity to improve through the writing process and develop as critical thinkers.

By Adam Clay Guest Writer AN OPINION

ELIZA COOKE

As technology continues to evolve and change the way we learn, educators are al ways on the lookout for tools that can en hance student learning and engagement. One such tool that has been gaining pop ularity in recent years is the use of artifi cial intelligence (AI) language models like ChatGPT in high school classrooms. While some may be skeptical of the use of AI in education, there are many benefits to incor porating ChatGPT into high school curric ulums.

At its core, ChatGPT is an AI language model designed to respond to user input with coherent and contextually appropriate language. Trained on a massive dataset of written language, ChatGPT has the ability to generate human-like responses to a wide range of prompts. This makes it an incredi bly useful tool for high school students who are looking to improve their writing and crit ical thinking skills.

One of the main benefits of using ChatGPT in the classroom is that it allows students to practice their writing and critical thinking skills in a low-stakes environment. Because ChatGPT is an AI language mod el, students can experiment with different writing styles and approaches without fear of judgement or negative consequences. This type of practice can be incredibly valuable for students who may be hesitant to share their writing with their peers or teachers.

Another benefit of using ChatGPT in the classroom is that it can help students devel op their research skills. Because ChatGPT has access to a massive dataset of written lan guage, it can provide students with a wealth of information on a given topic. This can help students learn how to sift through large amounts of information to find the most relevant and useful sources. Additionally, ChatGPT can help students learn how to evaluate the credibility of sources and make informed decisions about what information to include in their writing.

Despite the many benefits of using ChatGPT in the classroom, there are some who are skeptical of its use. One common argument against the use of AI language models like ChatGPT in education is that they may discourage students from learning to write and think critically on their own. Some educators worry that students may become too reliant on ChatGPT and fail to develop their own writing and critical think ing skills.

While it is true that there is a risk of stu dents becoming too reliant on ChatGPT, this risk can be mitigated by careful implementation of the tool. Educators can work to ensure

voicebox

All photos by Raffi Charkoudian-Rogers

that students are using ChatGPT as a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, their

In Joseph Heller’s famous satirical novel, Catch-22, there is a character named Major Major Major (his dad had a weird sense of humor). When Major grows up, he joins the Army to fight in World War 2. A computer with a similar sense of humor to Major’s dad makes Major Major Major a Major overnight. He went to bed a recruit in boot camp and woke up a Major, immediately outranking his now distraught drill sergeant. Nobody questioned how this promotion could possibly happen. The computer said he was Major Major Major Major; it didn’t matter that he had been in the military for less than a month. Nobody thought to question this bizarre promotion and blindly carried on with this computer’s joke.

stage to gather, organize, develop, and revise their ideas to be able to communicate them to another person. Yes, the process takes time, but it is necessary. The only way to get better at writing is to write. Don’t just take my word for it, Stephen King, in his book On Writing, says, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” Further, experts at the National Writing Project also agree that the best way to get better at writing is to write. Several years ago I participated in the University of Maryland Writing Project. We spent a large part of each day in this month-long program writing. I saw, first-hand, how much better my writing got as a result.

While ChatGPT is much faster - students are actually not doing any of the necessary work. How do students benefit from allowing ChatGPT to do all the thinking?

it is important that we embrace tools like ChatGPT that can enhance student learning and engagement.

Catch-22 was published in 1961. Heller was making fun of our reliance on technology with this scene. However, I don’t think Heller could have ever imagined what computers can do now. He would be horrified. His novel has a lot to do with absurdity and it is absolutely absurd to think that ChatGPT has any educational value at the high school level. Writ- ing, at its core, is a way to share ideas. Writing is a process and writers must go through each

I have heard both students and writers on the subject of ChatGPT suggest that it is the teachers’ fault if they ask questions that can be answered by artificial intelligence. If they do not want students to use this program, then they need to change the questions they are asking. However, since one can enter literally anything into this ChatGPT program - how can a teacher possibly create a prompt that is ChatGPT-proof? There have even been reports of ChatGPT passing the Bar Exam and the MCAT. Yes the technology is impressive, but when students enter an essay prompt into ChatGPT to generate their essay - that is not impressive, or ethical.

I have been teaching freshman English for 20 years now. One of my favorite aspects of teaching freshmen is watching their writing improve from September to June. However, the best part of teaching freshman English is when the students recognize how much they have grown over the year themselves. They put in the work, they learn from their previous writing assignments, and they embrace the writing process because they see the benefits of the time that they put in. When students take shortcuts like ChatGPT, they are also denying themselves any sense of pride or satisfaction from their work. This feeling is one that can never be generated artificially.

We need to keep our educational tools authentic. If we do not curtail this dangerous trend of allowing artificial intelligence to think for humans, we are going to have some major major major major problems.

“You could use it as an example to go off of but not copy it and [instead] just take some of the ideas from what it gives you and make it your own.”

“As we continue to move forward in society there’s going to be a lot more technology so keeping people from using technology is kind of counterproductive to what education should be.”

“You’re not really practicing and… you’re not really making your skills get better.”

“If it does your work for you, then I guess you’re not really learning anything.”

MISHO PEHLKE freshman

LATON PFEIFER HICKS freshman

DANA AVIV sophomore

Stay away, Chat

By Danny Cole Guest Writer AN OPINION

Hey Chat– WE KNOW.

WE KNOW you think you’re pretty clever.

WE KNOW you think you’re even smarter than us.

WE KNOW you are here to C

DANNY COLE

BUT– can you do what we do?

WE KNOW you can churn out an essay on The Great Gatsby in a matter of minutes.

Impressive, but can you read a set of Ikea directions? If not our students will be paying people to build and install things for the rest of their lives, and man does that get expensive. Are you going to pay for all of that?

WE KNOW you can analyze literature

and produce analyses, etc., but can you teach our students to think for themselves? After all, the world would be pretty dull if everyone always felt, thought and said the same exact thing.

WE KNOW a ton of our current high school students love you, but what happens when they get to college? Can you help them write essays by hand and take final exams??

What’s that– you don’t know what a final exam is? Well don’t worry– you can hit the snooze for two hours because you aren’t allowed to help anyway.

WE KNOW you’re quite popular with the college kids too, but can you help them get a job after they graduate? Can you drive them to their interviews? Do you even own a collared shirt or a tie? Sure you’re great in 1D and 2D, but can you talk face-to-face with your prospective boss?

Hmm, I guess students will be on their own for that too.

I’m sorry I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings... oh wait, I forgot that unlike humans, you don’t have feelings. My bad.

Okay so maybe you can’t help with all that stuff, but I’m sure you’ve got other strengths,

right?

WE KNOW you can read a classic novel at the speed of sound, but can you read a bedtime story? My 4-year-old demands three per night, and recently I’ve just been running out of steam. I’m sure you won’t disappoint her, right?

WE KNOW you’ve got a great sense for spelling and grammar, but how about your sense of smell? My 2-year-old is still in diapers and I’m really tired of changing them... can you help a brother out?

I gotta be honest Chat, this has been a pretty eye-opening conversation for me (no pun intended– I forgot you don’t have eyes). Maybe it’s best that we don’t see each other during the school day? It’s okay though, we can still be friends on the outside.

How about I come over tonight and you make me dinner? Wait, you’re telling me you don’t know how to cook either? Jeez, it seems that despite all of your boasting and bragging, you’re really just all talk.

It’s okay that you don’t know how to do all of these things, because WE KNOW.

Danny Cole teaches Honors English 10 and 11 at Blair.

Closing the doors to our privacy

Viveka Sinha Staff Writer

In the stressful world of high school, many students considered the school bathrooms a safe haven. However, this sanctuary was stolen away on Jan. 5 when the doors on Blair’s student bathrooms were removed. This decision is a blatant invasion of privacy for students who use the bathrooms as a refuge within Blair and an ineffective solution to drug use problems that only creates new disruptions.

Blair Principal Renay Johnson outlined the behaviors that prompted the removal of bathroom doors. “Physical assaults… lots of drug use, lots of vaping, [and] other negative behaviors,” she explained. Johnson believes that removing bathroom doors was a quick and easy solution to these problems. “If the door’s open, and I walk by and look in, and I see someone lying down, I’ll get involved, my staff will get involved, the other students will get involved,” she said.

While administrators removed bathroom doors with the right intentions, their “solution” only displaces negative activities and inconveniences students. Senior Agata Czaja believes that the lack of doors on the bathrooms just leads to students doing drugs in hiding. “The amount of drugs that are going on is still exactly the same, people are just more sneaky now.”

Sophomore Kripa Krishnan corroborates that “stadium-style” bathrooms will only move drug use into individual stalls and disrupt their regular use. “I don’t think it will [prevent smoking]. Rather than carrying on talking outside of the stalls like they normally do, [students will] just sit in the big stall, which is actually worse because it’s

also stopping people with disabilities from being able to use the accessible stall,” she said. In the case of an overdose, students locked in stalls would also be significantly harder to locate and aid.

If the door’s open, and I walk by and look in, and I see someone lying down, I’ll get involved, my staff will get involved, the other students will get involved.

Aside from the ineffectiveness of the “stadium-style bathrooms,” the removal of bathroom doors eliminated a space where students could take a break from academic and social stressors in the building.

Sophomore Danielle Coly-Boateng wrote a letter to Johnson expressing

We figured out we can see by the crack. Because we’re security, we have to do certain things that [others wouldn’t].

how she feels this decision has violated her privacy and met with the principal to discuss the policy. “I have pretty bad anxiety and I like my privacy when going to the bathroom. [Johnson called] me up to the office and she [explained] the dangers of the bathroom,” she said.

“I can understand the drug overdoses but… a lot of us need a safe space [in the] bathroom.”

The issue lies in the fact that everyone’s privacy is being violated when only a small portion of the school is participating in harmful behaviors. “[Removing bathroom doors] punishes everybody for the actions of a small group of people,” Coly-Boateng pointed out.

Students who veil also relied on enclosed bathrooms as a place to cover their hair. “[In] the Muslim community, a lot of [women] have hijabs and they touch up the hijab [in the bathroom]. It’s kind of violating to have these doors wide open,” Coly-Boateng said. Students are also unable to use the bathrooms to change their clothes.

“People used to change in the bathrooms, [but] women can’t change anymore,” Czaja pointed out.

These issues exacerbate students’ existing privacy concerns with security personnel checking in on bathrooms. Security guard Ericka Pastor confirmed that she looks through the cracks in bathroom stalls to determine if students are inside. “We figured out we can see by the crack. Because we’re security, we have to do certain things that [others wouldn’t],” she said.

Czaja recounted an instance when she felt uncomfortable with a male security guard having full view into the women’s bathroom.

“A lot of male security guards… will look into the bathroom. Recently I was hanging out with my friends on the floor [of a bathroom] and some guy looked into the bathroom and [said], ‘Ladies, you have to get out of there.’ This was before 7:40, and we [thought]: ‘What’s your problem? Why are you as a man looking in the women’s bathroom?’” she said.

These problems don’t pertain

to only Blair, as the doorless bathrooms have also been implemented elsewhere across MCPS. “Our stadium-style bathrooms have really caught on in other high schools across the county,” Johnson said.

Daisy Merkowitz, a senior at Albert Einstein, explained that the situation at their school is similar to that at Blair. “I don’t remember ever having [bathroom doors]. It’s always just been open,” they said.

Still, many Einstein students feel that the lack of bathroom doors does not alleviate the drug problems. “There are stalls. Removing doors doesn’t prevent people from doing [drugs]. If they’re going to do it, they’re going to do it,” Merkowitz said.

On Feb. 13, MCPS also released a community message to all parents, students, and staff, indicating that “latches are being installed on exterior restroom doors in secondary schools.” MCPS Director of Public Information Jessica Baxter clarified that the latches will be used to keep all bathroom doors open. “The latches in secondary schools have a hook that attaches to the wall to keep the door propped open,” she wrote in an email to Silver Chips. “The purpose is to increase monitoring and to discourage inappropriate behavior,” the email continued.

With the implementation of these latches, the privacy violation has become a countywide issue, making it all the more urgent that we find an alternative solution to combating drug use in schools. Czaja suggested harm reduction and nuanced conversation as better options. “A more productive [solution] would be to introduce more nuanced dialogue about drugs… We need to be treated more like people entering adulthood rather than people who are still children.”

Merkowitz believes that awareness education is another strategy to prevent drug use. “Harm reduction teaching and health classes [would] be better,” they said.

Fortunately,

it seems that we are moving in the right direction with the introduction of fentanyl awareness assemblies at Blair and Narcan trainings across the county. “What they are doing now with helping people figure out how to use Narcan is really helpful,” Czaja said, “since that actually promotes harm reduction and people are seeing more of the risks of what [fentanyl] can do rather than just ‘no for the sake of no.”

RENAY JOHNSON

ERICKA PASTOR

A fitting first response

More mental health professionals should be dispatched to 911 calls

By Kyla Smith Staff Writer AN OPINION

When outcry against police violence swept the nation during the COVID-19 pandemic, many began to question not only the behavior of police, but also their role as a blanket answer to almost all emergency calls. Now, some locales are benefitting from the fruits of this discourse: crisis response teams—made up of mental health clinicians and social workers—that have replaced armed officers in some emergency response scenarios. These teams have proved effective and efficient in cities and counties where they have been piloted—thus, they should become a standard part of emergency services in the U.S.

One such team is Montgomery County’s Mobile Crisis Team, which dispatches licensed mental health professionals into local communities from the Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Crisis Center in Rockville. The center is home to a number of different clinicians, behavioral technicians, and peer support staff and runs 24/7.

According to DHHS Crisis Center manager Beth Tabachnick, some emergency situations do not necessitate police intervention and are better for mobile crisis teams to handle. “A lot of times [in] those situations… it’s not a good use of our law enforcement partners’ time and it’s not the most respectful way

of addressing a situation to have police on scene.”

Although the team defaults to police when violence is threatened, it began implementing a new protocol in July to assess if each scenario should involve law enforcement. This allows the mobile crisis team to go out into Montgomery County communities and help those in need, reducing police presence that may make people feel unsafe.

There should be no reason why states should have education and mental health at the lowest spending items on their budget and corrections at the top.

Since the introduction of this protocol, DHHS has seen a major dip in requests for aid that ultimately require police involvement.“We’ve been having our teams go out utilizing this protocol, where we have a much significantly reduced number of calls where we engage law enforcement at all throughout the call,” she says.

Having the proper response workers attending to situations decreases violence and unnecessary

jail time. Denver’s Support Team Assisted Response (STAR) program, which launched in June 2020, deploys medical technicians and behavioral health clinicians to nonviolent 911 calls related to mental health, homelessness, and substance abuse, among other issues.

According to Associate Director of Criminal Justice Services at the Mental Health Center of Denver Chris Richardson, no one was injured or arrested in STAR’s first 11 months of operation, and no police backup was ever requested. A June 2022 study on the STAR program also reported that Denver saw a 34 percent decrease in crimes during STAR’s six-month pilot.

Meanwhile, people with mental illness are four to six times more likely to be incarcerated than others in the general population. Employing first responders trained for mental health situations instead of sending police officers to all calls will help lower this figure.

Part of the solution to this elevated incarceration rate is changing the nation’s overall approach to mental health as to prevent unnecessary incarceration that further harms those who need clinical support, according to Program Director of School and Justice Initiatives for the American Psychiatric Association Foundation Christopher Seeley. “This includes shifting the way in which we respond to community members who are in a mental health crisis, as two million times each year, a community member with serious

mental illness is booked into one of our local jails, causing a vicious cycle to begin [that re-traumatizes] these community members [without] getting them connected to support services,” he says.

Indeed, the Treatment Advocacy Center reported in 2016 that “the Los Angeles County Jail, Chicago’s Cook County Jail, or the New York’s [Rikers] Island Jail Complex each hold more mentally ill inmates than any remaining psychiatric hospital in the United States.” The center also found that mentally ill inmates remained incarcerated longer than other prisoners, as many found it difficult to understand and follow jail and prison rules. Incorporating mental health professionals into emergen-

cy response is the first step in getting these individuals the care they need from the start so they cease to be prisoners of a system that fails to address their illnesses.

Thus, mental health first response services should be implemented across the country. It is imperative that people are supported by professionals during emergencies in a way that does not lead to unnecessary arrest, hospitalization, or death. As such, the U.S. needs to properly invest in mental health responders who are working for the well being of their communities. “There should be no reason why states should have education and mental health at the lowest spending items on their budget and corrections at the top,” Seeley says.

Snow more days off Board of Education implements virtual learning for inclement weather days

By Caleb Plank and Viveka Sinha Staff Writers AN OPINION

The joy of waking up and see ing a blanket of white through the window, checking to see if school has been canceled, and running outside to spend hours playing in the snow is a fond childhood mem ory for many. But the county’s new plan to conduct online instruction on inclement weather days is rip ping this exciting experience away and once again confining students to the isolation and loneliness of virtual learning.

Approved by the Board of Ed ucation on Jan. 12, the new policy states that online classes will always run on a two-hour delay schedule and will only be implemented if “the impacting event is predictable, part of a multi-day scenario or pri or preparation and communication with families, students, and staff has taken place.”

The county also debuted a sys tem of color-coded operational statuses to communicate closures, delays, and virtual learning days, with code purple indicating a virtual learning day.

Board member Lynne Harris explained that meeting the annual state-mandated quota of instructional days was a motivating factor for the online learning plan. “Nobody wants to add school days onto the end of the school year… [but] we have a mandatory minimum number of instructional days,” she said.

Harris also believed that missing instructional days would be a source of worry for students. “If

you want to talk about [students] being stressed and anxious… trying to squeeze more learning into fewer days… is a recipe for that. Students will not be able to learn under those circumstances.”

Additionally, Harris voiced that a key concern during the pandemic was students’ ability to get regular interaction and support from teachers and classmates. “One of the things that we know has to happen to recover from the pandemic effects on learning is to have more time [in classrooms],” she explained. But how can the solution to the damage caused by virtual

learning be more virtual learning?

Teachers also struggled with Zoom classes during the pandemic. “I have… PTSD from virtual learning. Zoom is very difficult because you don’t see faces,” science teacher Manana O’Donovan said.

For Erik Lodal, another science teacher, the new inclement weather policy is ineffective and unduly burdens teachers, especially those with children. “I’m going to try to be teaching people online where nobody really engages me because everybody’s cameras are off… but then I’ve got [my] children who are needing emotional support right

next to me. It’s just a terrible set of circumstances for [getting] anything remotely useful done.”

Internet and connectivity inconsistencies also plague online learning and make it difficult for some students to keep up with lessons. “If lesson plans were continuing and some portion of the class wasn’t able to participate in them… when they [go] back to school, then they’re behind already,” junior Mara Chen-Goldberg said.

Indeed, many students who gave MCPS feedback on this policy prior to its approval expressed these concerns regarding the coun-

ty’s proposal. “[MCPS] invited us to a 30-minute Zoom session with a bunch of other students to [ask] us all the problems that [we] think might arise. A lot of students said ‘We don’t want this to happen. This is not in our best interest,’” sophomore Sam Ross said. Despite this, MCPS proceeded with the plan, disregarding student input.

Instead of aiming for a seamless all-weather learning protocol that Frankensteins together online and in-person instruction, MCPS should allow snow days to be student catch-up days. O’Donovan explained how the county’s plans will likely not pan out as expected and the time will be used as a check-in period instead. “There is [what the] Board of Education intends to do and there’s the reality… You can always use [snow days] as [a] check-in time, [answer] questions, practice more,” O’Donovan said.

“I have… PTSD from virtual learning. Zoom is very difficult because you don’t see faces.

Such skepticism about the effectiveness of virtual learning arose from the lived experiences of students and teachers who braved a year and a half of online school during the pandemic. “What’s the point of it?” Ross said. “It’s not [a] beneficial part of the school experience.”

CHRISTOPHER SEELEY

GRAPHIC BY KYLA SMITH | DATA COURTESY OF MCPD

College Board guts new AP African American Studies course

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD AN OPINION

There is a reason that College Board’s new AP course is called African American Studies and not African American History. To study the Black experience as a whole is to acknowledge historical events and figures, cultural contributions, scholarly theory, and current issues of interest. The focus should be not only history, but also a general understanding of how the Black diaspora has shaped the United States.

The focus should be not only history, but also a general understanding of how the Black diaspora has shaped the United States.

The AP African American Studies course originally included all of these elements, but College Board recently gutted the class, eliminating important aspects of Black studies. While the company claims the edits were made before Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis publicly condemned and blocked the

course from being taught in Florida schools, the removal of certain units conveniently addresses Florida officials’ objections.

Florida Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. called the AP African American Studies course “woke indoctrination masquerading as education,” listing Black feminist thought and Black queer studies as examples of concerning topics presented in the curriculum. Shortly thereafter, College Board released a revised curriculum with those two units missing. Also notably removed was the unit on the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, a change that erases a watershed chapter of the Black community’s struggle from the course.

College Board’s changes scrub out pivotal elements of Black history and culture, creating an AP African American Studies course that presents the Black community as a monolith rather than a diverse and intersectional group of people. In fact, mentions of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the woman who coined the term “intersectionality,” have been deleted from the revised version of the course. Without Crenshaw’s work, it is almost impossible to discuss the way in which Black identity interacts with other identities.

Among other scholars expunged from the course are Roderick Ferguson, a Yale professor who studies Black queer social movements, and Audre Lorde, a prominent Black lesbian poet. The erasure of such Black figures that hold other marginalized identities is an incredible loss that eliminates nuance and diversity from the curriculum. For the course to truly be African American Studies, it must feature all African American identities—exempting Black feminism and Black queer studies leaves an irreparable hole in the course material.

College Board’s changes... [create a]... course that presents the Black community as a monolith rather than a diverse and intersectional group of people.

Other than removing intersectionality from the course, College Board has also chosen to take out lessons on BLM, one of the largest social movements in the nation’s history. Removing this material

Editorial Cartoon

reinforces the idea that racism is a thing of the past. BLM is a response to the ongoing police brutality against the Black community, a symptom of the bigotry built into American society.

If we do not teach students about modern racism, we perpetuate its existence. Reducing racism to slavery and segregation tells the American myth that with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act, all racism was abolished. If people continue to believe that injustice against Black people is only part of history and not a present and real threat to millions, nothing will change.

In the same vein, College Board has cut the word “systemic” from the AP African American Studies course, effacing a term used to describe the way racism is rooted into American society. Our government is a corrupt system designed to oppress Black people and discriminate against them in every facet of life, from employment to education. The absence of the word “systemic” makes it unbelievably difficult to teach about this aspect of racism entrenched in American government. We cannot risk students being ignorant of structural violence, as failing to acknowledge it will further the mistreatment and

Reducing racism to slavery and segregation tells the American myth that with the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act, all racism was abolished.

abuse of Black people by police and other government institutions. While College Board claims that its edits had nothing to do with political pressure, many, including scholars who had previously endorsed the course, have questioned the validity of its statement. Because the removed units deal with politically fraught topics, it seems clear that College Board robbed students of an honest education to appease bigoted politicians.

Regardless of its motives, however, the purging of the Black experience’s critical aspects from the AP African American Studies course was the wrong decision on the part of College Board. As an educational institution, it is responsible for creating comprehensive and representative curriculums for students, and it has failed.

A new model for objectivity in journalism

By Andre Parker Ombudsman

Former executive editor of The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and fellow journalist and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward published an article in the Post on Jan. 30 entitled “Newsrooms that move beyond ‘objectivity’ can build trust.” Their essential argument is that the concept of “objectivity” in the news is a construct largely shaped by white male editors, and that the pursuit of total objectivity has often led to “bothsidesism”—the idea that journalists should always give both sides of an argument equal coverage—that ironically skews the news rather than centers it. The two veteran journalists encourage the public to reexamine what traits news sources should be valued for, and Downie points out that the conversation on objectivity raises a fundamental question: objective by whose standard?

Objectivity has generally been defined within the context of media as reporting both sides of every issue equally and without personal bias. And while Downie Jr. and Heyward believe that journalists expressing personal opinions on social and political issues publicly “erodes the perception of their organization’s fairness and open-mindedness,” they argue that organizations could benefit from

allowing some of this expression to guide their coverage.

In “Beyond Objectivity,” the report Downie Jr. and Heyward published for Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, the two recommend striving for “not just accuracy, but truth.” Among other guidelines, the authors push each newsroom to establish its own specific policies and core values based on its goals and audiences. The report stresses conscientious journalism by a “new generation” of diverse reporters, editors, and media leaders who reflect and represent the communities they cover.

The conversation on objectivity raises a fundamental question: objective by whose standard?

Many have reacted to Downie Jr. and Heyward’s Post article with outrage, panic, and ridicule, describing it as a push to abandon facts. In an article for the Washington Examiner, columnist Quin Hillyer derides how the authors “devolve… into the left-wing’s obsessive field of nightmares against which reporters must battle: ‘persistent racism and white nationalism… the treatment of LGBTQ+ people; income inequality… the causes and

effects of climate change; voting rights and election inequality; and even the very survival of our democracy.”

Amid the article’s contemptuous tone and trivialization of racism, Hillyer points to Pew Research’s finding that 76 percent of U.S. adults believe in “bothsidesism.” But while the research shows American adults largely in favor of giving every side equal coverage, it’s worth noting that young adults, ages 18–29, are the most likely age group to believe the opposite, with 28 percent disagreeing with bothsidesism.

We at Silver Chips serve Blair, one of the most diverse schools in Maryland, and strive to represent the opinions of the communities in our area. We hope to be a publication that amplifies and uplifts a new generation of young journalists and activists by giving them a platform for their truth.

In our February 2022 cycle, Silver Chips wrote a story on the deadly conflict between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front and the Ethiopian government and the impacts it had on Blair’s “We The East” Ethiopian and Eritrean Club. Silver Spring has the largest Ethiopian community outside Ethiopia, and due to Blair’s substantial Ethiopian and Tigrayan population, the war led to divisions within the school’s Ethiopian and Eritrean communities.

The local significance of this

conflict made it crucial for Silver Chips to focus on the voices in the affected community, centering students of Tigrayan, Amhara— Ethiopia’s second largest ethnic group—and Eritrean descent in the dialogue, rather than trying to relay a sterile and unbiased narrative ourselves.

As part of the discussion for this column, I conferred with our current and future Editors-in-Chief on Silver Chips’ policies regarding writers’ expression and “objectivity.” They stood by the paper’s founding philosophy: to be a forum for student expression and to print stories that pertain to the entire Blair community. For them, factual accuracy and truth are paramount, but being bound to the conventions of objectivity hinders the paper’s reporting, as fulfilling Chips’ mission includes amplifying the perspectives of marginalized people in our community who are the most affected by, and thus the most knowledgeable on, local issues.

Factual

To be the best possible means of expression for Blair and Silver Spring, Silver Chips should be a place for young people to freely discuss social and political issues and for all to find and share local perspectives—our local truth. Thus, the policies and values that guide the paper should also be re-examined and re-aligned with each new class of incoming staff members and as the community we serve changes.

Finally, the values of Silver Chips should mirror its readership. I encourage you to share your input on this topic or any topics in this edition of Silver Chips with us by emailing me at scombud@ gmail.com or writing a Letter to the Editors to connect with our Editors-in-Chief!

PHOTO BY HENRY REICHLE

To contact Andre, email scombud@gmail.com

accuracy and truth are paramount, but being bound to the conventions of objectivity hinders [our] paper’s reporting.

ELIZA COOKE

Un resumen del Mes de la Historia Afroamericana Celebrando la comunidad afroamericana

Por Estefany Benitez Gonzalez y Kevin Vela Editores-en-Jefe

El mes de herencia afroamericana se celebra desde el primero de febrero hasta el primero de marzo. Este mes se celebra para honrar la contribución de la comunidad afroamericana en los Estados Unidos. Es un mes para honrar a las figuras que lucharon por la libertad de la comunidad afroamericana, como puede ser Martin Luther King Jr. y Rosa Parks, por nombrar algunos. Originalmente, se inició como una semana en 1926. Después del movimiento por los derechos civiles en la década de 1960, la importancia de este evento creció, hasta que eventualmente, en 1976, el presidente Gerald Ford nombró oficialmente a febrero como el mes de la herencia afroamericana. La comunidad de Blair también toma participación para que los estudiantes puedan aprender y participar activamente durante este mes.

Comunidad

El condado de Montgomery creó eventos virtuales a los que todas las personas pudieron asistir. El pasado 12 de febrero, se llevó a cabo una competición de cocina organizada por el Departamento de Parques y Recreación del Condado de Montgomery. Se cocinó y discutió sobre la comida y el impacto que ha tenido en la comunidad afroamericana. También hubo eventos en persona para toda la familia. El 19 de febrero, las familias pudieron participar en una exploración de la historia afroamericana en el condado de Montgomery; este evento tuvo lugar en Woodland Manor Cultural Park.

Semana de Espíritu Escolar

Durante la semana del 13 al 17 de febrero, los estudiantes pudieron mostrar su espíritu escolar y a la vez celebrar este mes tan importante para la co- munidad. El lunes fue día de pijama, el martes podían vestirse con un atuendo inspirado en las décadas de los 70 u 80, el miércoles era hora de vestirse como una celebridad afroamericana, el jueves era el día del hip-hop, y el viernes, un día para vestirse con ropa cultural.

Educación

Durante la semana del 6 al 13 de febrero, Montgomery Blair, junto con

la Sra. Hughes, otros maestros, e incluso la Sra. Johnson, planearon e implementaron una semana lla-

Una cosa que aprendí de este viaje fue lo importante que es tener un mentor que trabaje en el área que estés interesado, realmente te puede beneficiar para ser la persona que quieres ser.

mada Powerful Black Lives Matter in Education. Durante esa semana, se realizó una colaboración con las

admisión, ayuda financiera, carreras, exámenes y más. Cualquier estudiante del grado 8 hasta el 12 podían asistir. Para los estudiantes de escuela intermedia se llevaron a cabo talleres y discusiones sobre la vida en la universidad y el FAFSA. Esta actividad se llevó a cabo con la ayuda del condado de Montgomery y el NAACP ( National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).

Servicio a la comunidad

Los estudiantes también tuvieron la oportunidad de obtener horas de servicio comunitario. Para ello, tenían que seleccionar a una persona afroamericana de su elección que haya tenido algún impacto en algún área de estudio. Aquellos que hayan completado correctamente el proyecto, en mar-

“Una cosa que aprendí de este viaje fue lo importante que es tener un mentor que trabaje en el área que estés interesado, realmente te puede beneficiar para ser la persona que quieres ser”.

nealdi. En la discusión, se habló sobre las dificultades que enfrentan los afrolatinos. Al respecto, Denis-Rosario comenta que, “Ni siquiera en tu propia tierra te consideran como igual, tienes que estar atento ante todo”. La comunidad afrolatina también se identifica como afroamericana, por su ascendencia africana compartida. Milagros Valdez Montero, una estudiante del doceavo grado, expresa lo que

Ni siquiera en tu propia tierra te consideran como igual, tienes que estar atento ante todo.

Escuelas y Universidades históricamente negras (Historically Black colleges & universities, HBCU por sus siglas en inglés). Estas instituciones se enfocan en ayudar a la comunidad afroamericana pero todas las personas son bienvenidas. Esta organización está compuesta de diferentes universidades y el pasado 17 de febrero, realizó un evento en persona donde 50 representantes de diferentes universidades asistieron para dar información sobre

zo recibirán un email para llenar el formulario de horas y se les otorgarán dos.

Excursión de STEM

Los estudiantes de Blair asistieron a la conferencia de BEYA STEM, que proveyó aprendizaje, conexiones y celebración de la excelencia de personas afroamericanas en la industria de STEM. En el viaje, los estudiantes pudieron hablar con mentores involucrados en el área de STEM. Moosay Hailewood, un estudiantes del doceavo grado que participó en este evento, cuenta su experiencia, “Estábamos en un cuarto con 7, 8 mesas y cada mesa tenía dos mentores. Tuvimos alrededor de 10 a 20 minutos para hablar con los mentores sobre sus experiencias”. Hubo estudiantes de diferentes escuelas, no solamente de Blair . Para Moosay, esta experiencia que le enseñó la importancia de tener a un mentor,

Afro-Latinx

En gran parte de paises de Latinoamérica, existe una herencia africana, ya que en muchos países la esclavitud es parte de la historia. Ser afrolatinx conlleva una serie de desafíos únicos, como pueden ser la discriminacion y los prejuicios. Para crear conciencia de esto, el pasado 22 de febrero, se llevó a cabo una discusión virtual dirigida por Manuel Mendez y organizaciones como Afrolatina/o forum, DC Afrolatino Caucus, Casa de las Américas, y Black Latinos; lo acompañaron tres escritoras afrolatinas: Marisel Moreno, Milagros Denis-Rosario y Kaysha Cori-

significa ser afrolatinx, “para mí es como cuando tu raza está ligada con varios, con otros varios continentes o países. Por ejemplo, mi país está ligado con África, Haití y España. Entonces a eso como que lo venimos llamando afroamericano. No podemos decir hoy, somos afro, afrolatinos o somos de América, sino afroamericanos. Entonces, nosotros nos consideramos, como podemos decir, africanos y haitianos a la misma vez”.

Milagros está orgullosa de su ascendencia y planea enseñar a las futuras generaciones a que no se sientan avergonzados sobre sus raíces, “Enseñarles que no tienen que avergonzarse. Algún día le dicen que afroamericano…hay algunas personas que se avergüenzan de que le digan así o de su color. Entonces, yo les quisiera enseñar que no es malo tener un color más oscuro que otro, o que te digan afroamericano. Te tienes que sentir orgulloso porque eres único y nadie te va a quitar eso”.

MOOSAY HAILEWOOD

MILAGROS DENIS-ROSARIO

FOTO POR ANAGHA BHUVANAGIRI

ABJINICHATTOPADHYAY

Blazer Destacado Por

Christell Hurtado Escritora

Compilado por Axel Henrriquez Escritor

Terremotos en Turquía y Siria

El pasado 6 de febrero hubo dos terremotos que afectaron a en partes de Turquía y Siria. El primero, de magnitud de 7.8, sucedió a las 4:17 AM y el segundo, de magnitud de 7.5, tuvo lugar unas nueve horas después. Esto afectó a personas de otros países, quienes también murieron en los terremotos. En total, ha habido más de 45.000 personas muertas y una gran cantidad de heridos. La principal razón porque hay tantos terremotos en Turquía se debe a que está encima de dos placas tectónicas. Ahora hay más de 1.500.000 personas sin casa debido a que los terremotos destruyeron sus casas y los dejaron sin electricidad. Con todo, estos terremotos les han costado más de 84 millones de dólares a los países afectados.

El footbolista Pelé muere a los 82 años

El 29 de diciembre del 2022 el rey de fútbol, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, mejor conocido como Pelé, murió a la edad de 82 años. El héroe nacional de Brasil, que el país considera como un tesoro nacional, murió de falla multiorgánica, resultado de la progresión del cáncer de colon que él tenía. En su vida, Pelé pudo enseñar al mundo sobre el arte del fútbol e inspiró a varias generaciones. Pelé es mundialmente conocido por ser el único jugador en ganar la copa mundial tres veces, siendo esto en los años 1958, 1962 y su último mundial, en 1970. Con cada una de las copas que ganó, estaba rompiendo las barreras de lo posible en el mundo del fútbol.

La nueva cárcel de El Salvador

Recientemente, El Salvador inauguró la cárcel más grande de toda Latinoamérica. Esta cárcel puede tener 40 mil personas adentro. La razón por la que El Salvador construyó esta cárcel es para poder encerrar a las personas que el gobierno de Nayib Bukele clasifica como “terroristas”. El gobierno de El Salvador ha estado batallando contra los grupos conocidos como MS-13 y calle 18. En respuesta a la guerra contra las pandillas que ha declarado El Salvador, el Presidente llamó a enfrentar las pandillas y ahora más de 60 mil pandilleros han sido encarcelados. La nueva cárcel en El Salvador se ve como una base militar y los oficiales dentro del recinto están uniformados con equipo SWAT para poder controlar a los criminales.

Ser un líder hoy en día no es fácil, ya sea para la comunidad, escuela o ambiente de trabajo. Se requiere de mucho coraje, disciplina, actitud y organización para poder apoyar y contribuir a la sociedad. Por eso, cuando alguien demuestra un compromiso con la comunidad, su presencia sobresale. Montgomery Blair High School, hay un gran líder en la comunidad hispanohablante llamado Jonathan Lemus que está en el doceavo grado. Jonathan ha sido inspiración para muchos estudiantes de Blair los últimos dos años y ha ayudado de muchas maneras:

desde proveer ayuda con la organización de la oficina de lenguas del mundo, hasta asistir y organizar eventos para el departamento de ELD (antes llamado ESOL). El idioma inglés es un obstáculo para muchos de los estudiantes de Montgomery Blair que han venido de sus países de origen recientemente. A aquellos que están tomando clases de ELD se les complica poder tomar algún tipo de clase que les guste. Jonathan no ha visto esto como un obstáculo, sino como una oportunidad para acercarse más a la comunidad hispanohablante y contribuir a la rica

cultura de nuestros países.

Jonathan explica lo que lo inspiró a ser un líder en la comunidad de Blair “provino al ver los estudiantes latinos que tienen mucho que dar, eso fue lo que me inspiró a mi para ser un líder, al ver que ellos pueden desarrollar muchas cosas como comunidad latina”. Jonathan también nos dice, “estoy orgulloso de ser líder porque yo sé que todo lo que hemos hecho, más de una persona se ha sentido con afecto y tomamos las cosas buenas que hemos hecho cuando una persona ha sido impactada en el grupo”.

Jonathan comenta que las personas que lo rodean son su motivación para seguir “Las personas que influyen en mi personalmente es mi familia; ellos son mi prioridad. En segundo, los maestros han influido bastante en mi vida, en el sentido que han influido es mandando apoyo emocional, dándome ánimos para poder seguir adelante, y cuando necesito ayuda ellos están dispuestos en brindarme el apoyo necesario”. La señora Barrera, la maestra de recursos de idiomas, dijo que, “ Jonathan tiene un impacto positivo en la comunidad de MBHS, debido a la dedicación y planificación de eventos culturales, especialmente en el Mes de la Herencia Hispana y la Noche Internacional”.

Jonathan es un modelo a seguir para estudiantes que hablan español, los que son multilingües y todos aquellos que están recién llegados al país. Además, tiene un impacto positivo en la comunidad estudiantil por su pasión para apoyar a sus compañeros y maestros. Como explica la Sra Barrera, “Es inspirador ser testigo de cómo Jonathan ha crecido como líder durante los últimos dos años. Él crea panfletos, mantiene comunicación efectiva y constante con los estudiantes involucrados en diferentes proyectos y aplica las sugerencias proveídas por sus maestros y compañeros. Esto muestra que está abierto a aprender y se esfuerza continuamente para mejorar así mismo. No tengo dudas de que Jonathan seguirá siendo una fuerza positiva de liderazgo en la comunidad de MBHS y más allá”.

Jonathan tiene muchas metas personales y lo que le impulsa para seguir ayuda a los demás es “que los estudiantes puedan lograr sus metas y cumplir nuestros sueños, porque es difícil al estar en este país y muchas personas o alumnos hispanos no tienen a sus familiares y se sienten tristes y nosotros queremos ayudarles a que se sientan cómodos al estar acá”. Junto a sus padres, maestros y personas de la comunidad, Jonathan ha podido lograr ser una persona llena de positivismo y de alegría para ayudar a los demás.

La escasez de maestros en MCPS

Por Jason Youm Escritor

Después del regreso de la pandemia, la escasez de profesores y suplentes ha sido notoria. Quizás, una profesora de inglés tuvo que supervisar una clase de salud, o un maestro sustituto llegó a clase muy tarde. La falta de los profesores es un problema grave que ha aumentado durante los últimos dos años. El problema es evidente en Blair, pero también existe en todo el condado y en los EE.UU. Desafortunadamente, esta inestabilidad ha tenido impactos negativos en el aprendizaje de los estudiantes.

Pero, ¿qué ha causado la falta de maestros? Como casi todo en la escuela, es un tema complicado. Una razón principal es la pandemia de COVID. Debido al virus, más profesores se están enfermando por más tiempo, mientras que otros se han retirado. Aunque MCPS ha proveído siete días extras de permiso por enfermedad de COVID, muchos profesores creen que no es suficiente. “Conozco a maestros que faltaron a la escuela durante dos, tres, cuatro semanas… usaron todos los días de COVID y la mayoría de sus días libres normales, también”, dice Erik Lodal, un profesor de ciencias en Blair.

Me siento mal pidiendo a otros que me sustituyan, porque sé que es inconveniente y estresante.

Además, la pandemia ha reducido el suministro de profesores en MCPS y todo el país. De acuerdo a la Oficina de Estadísticas Laborales, aproximadamente 2.6 millones de profesores y educadores han dejado el trabajo de enseñanza

durante la pandemia. Según Peter Cirincione, un maestro de ciencias sociales en Blair, muchos profe sores han dejado la profesión a causa de “miedo de la pandemia,” y sospecha que “no muchas perso nas están empezando un trabajo de enseñanza debido a otros trabajos mejor pagados”. Con un número tan grande de maestros que se fueron, MCPS está luchando para encontrar sus titutos. Pero no es tan fácil. Lodal explica que “hay muy pocos susti tutos, principalmente debido a los bajos salarios”. Después del año virtual, Lodal recuerda que “hizo un pedido en el sistema de susti tutos, y casi siempre un profesor sustituto lo reemplazaría… Ahora, obtengo un sustituto, como máxi mo, el 20% del tiempo”. Desafortunadamente, la escasez de maestros sustitutos significa que muchos profesores en Blair han sustituido para cubrir a otros, aún si no quieren. Un problema grave es que los profesores reciben poco dinero adicional cuando sustituyen a otros y solo pierden tiempo de planificación y calificación. “Yo he sustituido a otros profesores y he pedido a otros que me ayuden … Me siento mal pidiendo a otros que me sustituyan, porque sé que es inconveniente y estresante”.

La presión sobre los profesores, naturalmente, ha empeorado la salud mental de los maestros. Después de la pandemia, hay mucho papeleo, la preocupación por el virus, y el miedo de los cierres de la escuela - todos son peores de lo que eran hace unos años. A veces, Lodal siente que “realmente no quiero estar en la escuela”, pero normalmente no tiene la opción de descansar un día. Por esto, unos profesores organizaron una protesta. Según Cirincione, casi todos los profesores son parte del sindicato de docentes de MCPS. El pasado octubre, algunos de ellos participaron en una protesta, abogando por un salario mínimo de 60.000 dólares al año. Tres semanas después, MCPS y el

sindicato se pusieron de acuerdo para establecer un salario mínimo. Para Cirincione, el éxito “mostró que los profesores… tienen una voz en el condado”.

No ayuda a la situación de que los maestros deban recibir más dinero. Los profesores son trabajadores críticos que apoyan a decenas, a veces cientos, de estudiantes. Sin embargo, los profesores de secundaria de Maryland ganan, en promedio, 65,100 dólares cada año, 6% menos del salario medio que todos los trabajadores de Maryland.

Entonces, ¿cómo se puede solucionar este problema? Una vía obvia es aumentar el número de profesores y maestros suplentes, pero no es tan simple. Mucha gente no quiere trabajar como un sustituto a causa del bajo salario, así que el condado tiene que subir los salarios antes de contratar profesores nuevos. “No hay una solución universal”, admite Cirincione, “pero un incremento de los salarios de todos los profesores y sustitutos crearía un

mejor ambiente de trabajo”. Otra solución que Cirincione piensa que habría funcionado el año pasado para contratar nuevos maestros y suplentes es un mandato de la prueba de COVID. “En 2021 y 2022, alguna gente no quería enseñar porque Blair era un lugar de alto riesgo de COVID… un requisito de una prueba negativa del virus habría ayudado”. A causa de la escasez reciente de profesores en Blair, el agobio y trabajo entre ellos han incrementado. Más profesores que nunca han dejado sus trabajos de enseñanza, y existe un déficit grande de maestros sustitutos. Afortunadamente, hay esperanza - los profesores de MCPS están luchando por más profesores y sustitutos, salarios mejores, y una vuelta a la normalidad. Lodal está seguro que las protestas de maestros de MCPS y la recuperación de la pandemia y la economía “mejorarán las condiciones laborales para todos los profesores en Blair”.

FOTO POR KYARA ROMERO LIRA

JONATHAN LEMUS

Algunos profesores declararon una huelga para salarios y condiciones laborales mejores

FOTO POR RAFFI CHARKOUDIAN-ROGERS

MAESTROS SE ORGANIZAN Los maestros de Montgomery Blair se unen para luchar por sus derechos.

silverchips el 13 de marzo de 2023 La Esquina Latina C3

Dos caminos pre-universitarias:

La decisión escolar entre AP y matriculación doble

Por Samantha Frey Escritora

Tomar clases universitarias, trabajar en un ambiente más profesional, caminar en un campus universitario: la experiencia de un estudiante terciario. Todo esto, durante el año escolar, mientras se está asistiendo a Blair. Las clases de matriculación doble (clases que otorgan crédito universitario y de secundaria simultáneamente) ofrecen la oportunidad de ser parte de un programa nuevo que tiene similitudes con las clases de colocación avanzada (AP por sus siglas en inglés), pero también unas diferencias importantes.

A meta más grande de tomar una clase LAP es sacar una buena nota en los exámenes.

COLLEGE BOARD

El programa AP (colocación avanzada) empieza con las clases y termina con los exámenes AP. Este programa es controlado por College Board, una organización mundial. Ellos comentan que “la meta más grande de tomar una clase AP es sacar una buena nota en los exámenes”. Las universidades dan créditos escolares para los estudiantes que saquen 4 o 5 en el examen. Estos créditos pueden contar como un crédito requerido para completar una especialización universitaria. Tomar un semestre con clases AP en lugar de las clases en la universidad puede ahorrar a cada estudiante entre $800 y $2.400.

Por causa del gran tamaño de

Blair, los estudiantes tienen acceso a una variedad grandísima de clases AP. Los estudiantes pueden tomar clases clásicas, como Literatura inglesa AP, donde aprenden sobre las maneras de escribir ensayos analíticos y leer para identificar simbolismo, pero también hay algunas clases más únicas del currículo de AP. Un ejemplo es la clase de Geografía humana AP, donde los estudiantes aprenden sobre la agricultura y los patrones en los movimientos humanos. Los estudiantes pueden empezar a tomar clases de nivel AP en su primer año de escuela secundaria, aunque la mayoría de los estudiantes que toman clases AP están en los grados de once y doce. En realidad, algunas clases AP requieren que sus estudiantes hayan tomado una clase en la misma materia de menor nivel antes de tomar la clase AP.

Por otro lado, si no se obtiene una buena nota en el examen AP al fin del año, dicha clase AP no cuenta como crédito universitario. A pesar de que un estudiante saque As en la clase, si saca un 1 o 2 en el examen, no va a recibir crédito por la clase. El sentido de algunos estudiantes en clases AP es que no necesariamente toman la clase para aprender el contenido- solamente tienen que saber lo que va a aparecer en la prueba. Adicionalmente, otros estudiantes dicen que hay un “aire de elitismo” en muchas clases AP porque muchos estudiantes que quieren tomar clases avanzadas son competitivos, comparando notas y trabajando por horas cada noche. Por otro lado, las clases AP pueden ser una oportunidad para “beneficiar a los estudiantes de bajo rendimiento y a los que están subrepresentados en la educación superior”.

Aquí es donde el programa de matriculación doble tiene una gran

¿Cuanto cuesta su eduación?

Matricula promedio de un universidad Las clases AP El programa matriculación doble

0 Año Escolar (24 creditos) Semestre (12 creditos; 4 clases) Clase (4 creditos) CREADO POR SAMANTHA FREY UNA CLARA DIFERENCIA Comparando los costos de un año, un semestre y una clase para obtener una educación universitaria.

ventaja. Los estudiantes de Blair pueden involucrarse en este programa de Montgomery College, donde pueden tomar clases del nivel universitario y graduarse con un grado asociado en sus dos últimos años de escuela secundaria. Esto significa que los estudiantes que asisten a una universidad después de la escuela secundaria pueden graduarse en dos o tres años, comparado con los cuatro años típicos de un estudiante universitario. El programa de matriculación doble trajo grandes beneficios económicos. Empezando este año escolar, “toda la matrícula universitaria, cuotas, libros de texto y útiles de instrucción van a ser pagados por MC y MCPS”. En otras palabras, los estudiantes pueden obtener una educación universitaria com-

pletamente gratis. Las clases de Montgomery College cubren varias materias. Además de algunas clases básicas en las áreas de inglés, matemáticas, lenguaje, y historia, a los estudiantes en el programa de matriculación doble también se les ofrece clases como “Arqueología y evolución humana”, “Historia del deporte en América” y “Literatura afroamericana”. Similar a los cursos AP, la mayoría de estas clases cuentan como créditos escolares que estudiantes pueden usar para graduarse de Blair, y al mismo tiempo para graduarse de su futura universidad. Sin embargo, con todos sus beneficios, el programa de matriculación doble trae algunos desafíos. Ganar una experiencia universitaria podría significar perder tiempo val-

ioso en la escuela secundaria. Elyse M., una estudiante que se graduó del programa de matriculación doble dijo que “siempre estaba trabajando en ensayos y proyectos para mis clases de MC y no podía pasar tiempo con mis amigos”. Para mantener un equilibrio entre trabajar como un estudiante y mantener una vida social, es importante que los estudiantes tengan cuidado entre los cursos que eligen y la cantidad de trabajo que tomen. Hay oportunidades para estudiantes de Blair que nunca han existido antes de este año escolar. En el futuro, aunque sean clases innovadoras del programa AP o clases en el campus de Montgomery College, las posibilidades de obtener una educación están creciendo cada día.

El condado de Montgomery y el incremento de sobredosis en la comunidad MCPS

Recientemente, el uso de ciertas drogas está causando una gran preocupación en el condado de Montgomery, la más preocupante siendo el fentanilo. El fentanilo es una droga sintética fuerte de opioide que es similar a la morfina pero de 50 a 100 veces más potente.

Su uso original es para calmar el dolor en pacientes de cáncer pero también se produce ilegalmente a causa de sus propiedades opioides. El fentanilo se añade a otras drogas como heroína, cocaína y metanfetamina para incrementar su potencia. Esto resulta en más sobredosis, ya que las personas no se dan cuenta que lo están tomando. Los efectos del fentanilo incluyen felicidad extrema, aletargamiento, náuseas, confusión, estreñimiento, sedación, convulsiones, desmayos, problemas para respirar y pérdida del conocimiento. Pero si una persona toma dos miligramos crea una dosis mortal.

Los estudiantes que están sufriendo con su salud mental tienen un riesgo más alto de usar sustancias peligrosas. Es muy fácil que los estudiantes recurran al uso de drogas y alcohol cuando no pueden manejar sus emociones de una forma saludable. Por esta razón, el condado de Montgomery está preparando a los maestros en caso

de que algún suceso de sobredosis pueda ocurrir. Algunos maestros reciben entrenamiento en el uso de naloxona. Además, un grupo de estudiantes crearon una aplicación llamada “MCPS Stronger Student” donde los estudiantes podrán tener acceso a recursos de apoyo para cualquier crisis de salud mental.

La aplicación sirve anónimamente y es confidencial para que los estudiantes se sientan cómodos compartiendo información personal.

La aplicación también da acceso a contactos de emergencia y crisis, recursos para la salud mental y física, herramientas para hacer un reporte de acoso e información sobre los derechos de estudiantes en MCPS.

Y ha cambiado esto de alguna manera, como en la que las drogas y tienes como más miedo a que vuelva a pasar.

A causa del consumo de drogas, ha habido una gran cantidad de afectados en la comunidad, tal como una estudiante del condado de Montgomery, Lila Delgado, que recientemente perdió a su cuñado

por sobredosis. Según cuenta Lila, lo encontraron en su cuarto el sábado 7 de enero, pero comenta que, “según la familia de él, él estaba con mi hermana, pero no; entonces, él se murió el viernes en la noche. Lo encontraron al día siguiente, el sábado, en la cama de él en el cuarto y toda la familia lo andaba buscando. Lo llamaba mi hermana, pero obviamente él estaba en su cuarto, lo buscaron en todos lados menos en el cuarto de él”.

La sobredosis no solo afectó la vida de la víctima sino también la de todos los que le aman. Su familia y la familia de su novia ahora están llenos de miedo acerca de las drogas, encima del dolor desde su pérdida. Lila dice que, “yo veo muchos que lo hacen, entonces como que sabes, da miedo. Hoy en día después de lo que pasó, es como que tú quisieras decirles a los que lo hacen, oh, no lo hagas, pero lamentablemente no puedes cambiar eso”. Es difícil para los estudiantes ayudar en esta situación seria y es por eso que los recursos que MCPS está proveyendo son tan importantes. Tener un recurso profesional para abordar el problema podría salvar muchas vidas similares a la de él.

La escuela Montgomery Blair ha tomado cartas en este asunto y removió las puertas de los baños por rumores de que los estudiantes estaban consumiendo drogas. Por eso, han empezado a llamar a pro-

FOTO POR MADELINE GOLD PRESENTACIÓN EN BLAIR Blair lleva a cabo charla para informar a los estudiantes sobre el reciente aumento de sobredosis y como prevenirlo.

fesionales para informar a los estudiantes sobre el peligro de esto.

Durante la Semana de impacto se dieron charlas sobre los peligros y los recursos disponibles. En caso de sobredosis, los servicios de autobuses, como ride-on, empezaron a proveer naloxona, que ayuda en esta situación. Se puede estar en una parada de autobús y preguntarle al conductor si tiene naloxona disponible, como también en las estaciones de bomberos. Si algún estudiante está presente en esta situación, no debe de tener miedo de intentar salvar a la víctima o llamar

a la policía, ya que estarán protegidos por la ley del buen samaritano y habrán salvado a una persona. El condado de Montgomery ha tomado muchos pasos contundentes para crear un ambiente seguro donde los estudiantes se sientan cómodos utilizando los recursos que se están compartiendo. Además de combatir las sobredosis, estos recursos para la salud mental podrán evitar que ocurran más sobredosis ya que los estudiantes tendrán maneras de cuidar su salud mental.

Por Naila Romero-Alston y Kevin Vela Escritora y Editor-en-Jefe

término latinx es eficiente para promover la inclusión?

Por Giselle Zelaya Escritora

Para algunos, latinx es un término inclusivo que rechaza el binario de género, pero ¿qué pasa si no es tan inclusivo como parece y qué ocurre cuando se borra por completo? El Martes, 10 de enero de 2023, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, la gobernadora de Arkansas, anunció una orden ejecutiva para prohibir el uso del término “Latinx” en documentos del estado. Su justificación es que, “Uno no puede eliminar más fácilmente el género del español y otras lenguas romances de lo que uno puede eliminar vocales y verbos del inglés”.

Ahora en Arkansas la palabra “Latinx” deberá ser reemplazada por “Hispanic”, “Hispanics”, “Latino”, “Latinos”, “Latina” o “Latinas” dentro de los próximos 60 días en todos los departamentos y agencias estatales.

Las muchas etiquetas utilizadas para describir al grupo de personas que tienen sus raíces en América

Latina o España han dejado a algunos confundidos, otros enojados y muchas personas debatiendo qué palabra usar. Aunque el origen exacto del término Latinx no está claro, parece haber surgido de la comunidad queer de habla hispana en foros comunitarios en línea. El diccionario Merriam-Webster añadió el término en 2018. Actualmente este término se utiliza en las redes sociales y por estudiantes, activistas y académicos que quieren incluir a individuos no binarios y genderqueer.

Aunque este término ha ganado tracción en las redes sociales y en el

mundo académico, no se ha popularizado en el uso general. Un estudio realizado por el Pew Research Center en 2020 reveló que solo el 20% de los adultos latinoamericanos ha oído hablar del término latinx, y solo el 3% lo usa. El estudio también encontró que los jóvenes hispanos de 18 a 29 años y los hispanos con experiencia universitaria, se encontraban entre los que probablemente hayan oído hablar del término.

do en partes de habla hispana de América Latina, particularmente entre los jóvenes activistas sociales. Algunos creen que este término se adapta más al idioma y la pronunciación del español.

A pesar del discurso que rodea el término Latinx, muchos aprecian el término y se han acostumbrado a él. Aquí en Blair, por ejemplo, la Asociación de Líderes Latinx, un club para estudiantes latinoamericanos que buscan oportunidades de liderazgo, usa el término en su título. Génesis Valle, estudiante del grado 12 y miembro del club, explica que encuentra bien el término, “Para poder incluir a todos. Porque no todos somos incluidos cuando decimos latinos y siento que es bonito porque si yo fuera alguien [no binario] me gustaria ser incluida”.

Los hijos de inmigrantes que se identifican como homosexuales pueden estar menos dispuestos a revelar su orientación sexual por temor a perder la posición socioeconómica o el apoyo de su familia y comunidad étnica. Aunque la perspectiva de perder estos elementos protectores es traumatizante para todas las personas homosexuales, los homosexuales blancos de clase media están mejor equipados para preservar su seguridad financiera y pueden acceder más fácilmente a los espacios y organizaciones

Las distintas diferencias demográficas de aquellos que conocen o usan latinx dejan a muchos preguntándose si el término es inclusivo o elitista. Cuando una parte tan grande de la comunidad no usa o ni siquiera conoce el término, ¿qué tan inclusivo puede ser? Una frase que es realmente inclusiva ofrece el mismo peso a una amplia gama de experiencias y conocimientos; no pretende ser una identidad general. Puede ser extremadamente injusto y problemático imponer esta palabra a comunidades ya marginadas.

Otra palabra que se ha pasado por alto en gran medida es latíne, una palabra que ya se está utilizan-

¿Por qué la gente encuentra tan importante un término neutral en cuanto al género? La intersección entre una identidad individual latinoamericana y queer puede ser bastante complicada. Un estudio publicado por La Campaña de Derechos Humanos explora las experiencias de casi 2,000 jóvenes LGBTQ+ que se identifican como Latinx. La barrera más preocupante reportada por aquellos que se identifican como Latinx LGBTQ+ es la aceptación familiar. Aproximadamente el 60% de los jóvenes latinos LGBTQ+ informaron que su familia no era tolerante con la comunidad LGBTQ+, mientras que el 66% de los jóvenes blancos, el 48% de los jóvenes afroamericanos y el 46% de los jóvenes asiáticos / isleños del Pacífico dicen que sus familias eran tolerantes con la comunidad LGBTQ+.

Para poder incluir a todos. Porque no todos somos incluidos quando decimos latinos y siento que es bonito porque si yo fuera alguien [no binario] me gustaria ser incluida.

LGBTQ+ convencionales. Los inmigrantes LGBTQ+ pueden experimentar mayor discriminación, prejuicios y falta de aceptación que la mayoría de personas blancas y la comunidad LGBTQ+ “convencional” en lugares donde con frecuencia no son bienvenidos o aceptados. Como resultado, los inmigrantes LGBTQ+ podrían ser disuadidos de utilizar los servicios sociales accesibles en su propio grupo o en las comunidades LGBTQ+. Para algunos, latinx y latine no sólo sirven el propósito de ser términos de género neutral e inclusivo. También reconocen la distinta interseccionalidad de ser

queer y latinoamericano. MCPS ha tomado esto en cuenta y ha comenzado a usar un lenguaje más inclusivo. “En nuestra oficina de idiomas mundiales, en cuanto al material que publicamos para el uso en el salón, nosotros recomendamos el uso de una variedad de materiales. Por ejemplo, para ser inclusivo estamos usando textos y videos, por eso poemas u obras literarias e inclusivas o que incluyan lenguaje inclusivo”, dice Ana Hernández, la especialista de instrucción en los cursos de español para la Oficina de Currículo en el condado de Montgomery. “Y no solamente algo que es hábito, que ha sido una costumbre por muchos años, y nosotros de nuestra oficina les aseguramos proporcionarles capacitación profesional, o sea, entrenamiento a los a los líderes de los departamentos de cada escuela para que ellos estén al tanto de qué es lo más actualizado en la comprensión de lenguaje inclusivo”. Actualmente, MCPS utiliza principalmente hispano/latino, pero poco a poco ha comenzado a integrar el término latinx. Al final un término que describe la identidad de una persona es algo muy personal. La forma en que una persona elige describirse a sí misma depende completamente de ellos. Hernandez explica que, “para mí es más importante darle la opción a la gente de escoger el término con el que se sienta más cómodo, con el que se identifique. No estoy de acuerdo con que debamos escoger un término y forzarlo para que se use únicamente”.

El fenómeno conocido de insurrección se presenta en Brasil

El término “insurrección” resuena entre individuos, hogares y el gobierno estadounidense por causa de los ataques del 6 de enero de 2021. Solamente dos años y dos días después de esos ataques de ciudadanos que apoyaban a Donald Trump como su candidato y negaban los resultados de las elecciones que favorecieron a Joseph Biden, algo similar sucedió en Brasil. El 8 de enero de 2023 es una fecha para recordar en la historia de Brasil y el mundo. La policía dijo que entre 1.200 y 1.400 personas fueron arrestadas por asaltar un edificio del gobierno: Juntos, los manifestantes invadieron la Corte Suprema, el Congreso, y las oficinas presidenciales.

Todo esto, co -

stando millones de dólares en daños, empezó porque simpatizantes de Bolsonaro pensaron que las elecciones fueron fraudulentas. La polarización de opiniones políticas ha crecido en los últimos años, con ocho golpes de gobierno mundialmente en el 2021 solamente.

Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva, quien ganó entre las “elecciones seguras y legítimas” y que “varias organizaciones pudieron verificar la autenticidad”.

Para entender porque esto es un problema que probablemente no desaparecerá, se debe investigar los elementos subyacentes.

Tanto en las protestas del 6 de enero de 2021 como en las del 8 de enero de 2023, ambos candidatos, preferidos por los manifestantes, apoyaron la idea de protestar contra los resultados de las elecciones. Por ejemplo, Bolsonaro aún no ha concedido al candidato que ganó, el presidente Luiz Ignacio Lula De Silva, quien ganó entre las “elecciones seguras y legítimas” y que “varias organizaciones pudieron verificar la autenticidad”, de acuerdo con Arpad

Alves, ciudadano brasileño experto en política. Por eso, De Silva acusó a su predecesor de ser responsable de este “acto terrorista”. En respuesta al ataque, Lula calificó a los que estaban detrás del asalto al Congreso de “fascistas fanáticos” que serán “encontrados y castigados”. En comparación con los EEUU, el ex-presidente Donald Trump incitó a la violencia con un discurso público, donde dijo que “si no luchamos como un demonio no tendríamos más un país”. Con aprobación de sus líderes, los manifestantes siguieron con comentarios como “nunca nos rendiremos y nunca concederemos” de Trump y “las protestas son parte de la democracia” de Bolsonaro.

Una diferencia entre el ataque en Brasil y los EEUU es que los manifestantes brasilenos acamparon afuera de los edificios militares en la capital, Brasilia. Con casi 1.000 personas acampando, muchas personas creen que las protestas nacieron de este sitio. Los ataques en los EEUU no tenían esta población, ni ese tiempo en persona para planificar. Sin embargo, miembros de ambos grupos utilizaron foros en línea para hablar sobre los ataques con conspiradores. De acuerdo con Alves, “las redes sociales serán responsables; se permitirá que las personas publiquen noticias falsas o desinformantes”. Usando nombres de código como “Festa Da Selma” para hablar sobre el ataque, los partidarios de Bolsonaro tenían éxito al no activar los sensores de

las plataformas de las redes sociales que usaban. Desde entonces, esa expresión ha sido utilizada por más de 10.000 cuentas en tuits que se compartieron más de 53.000 veces. A simple vista, esta frase no tiene ningún significado, pero examinándose más de cerca, “Selma” es un juego de palabras con ‘selva’, una palabra utilizada por los militares brasileños como saludo o grito de guerra. Esto es similar al uso de “1776” como sinónimo de violencia en los ataques del 6 de enero. Usado comúnmente por miembros de los Proud Boys, con su documento que fue titulado “1776 Returns”.

Los Proud Boys son un grupo estadounidense responsable por la propagación de teorías de conspiración en línea anteriores a las protestas, especialmente la de que el ex-presidente Trump fue el verdadero ganador de las elecciones.

Durante las protestas brasileñas, usaron una retórica similar: muchos de los manifestantes pensaban que las elecciones fueron manipuladas por Lula, organizando su “toma de poder comunista”. Por eso, atacaron edificios gubernamentales buscando evidencia para confirmar esa teoría. Cuando no encontraron nada, empezaron a romper las obras históricas dentro de los edificios del gobierno, destruir las oficinas de oficiales y atacar las bases militares. Los oficiales gubernamentales empezaron a expresarse al respecto casi inmediatamente después de las protestas. El represente Jamie

Raskin llamó a los manifestantes brasileños “fascistas que se inspiran en los alborotadores del 6 de enero” en un tuit. Por otro lado, un activista brasileño, Ali Alexander, mandó un texto diciendo que “la suprema corte nacional es ilegítima. No reprimen a la ley ni al pueblo… Haz lo que sea necesario”. El gobierno de los EEUU fue uno de los primeros fundados con una democracia funcional: la idea de democracia estadounidense ha sido copiada por países alrededor del mundo. Por eso, tiene sentido que los cambios recientes, que demuestran una falta de aceptación de una elección perdida, estén repercutiendo en otros países. En esta insurrección, Brasil siguió los pasos de los Estados Unidos. En esta ocasión, la democracia sobrevivió los ataques, pero con problemas por delante, podría tener una consecuencia más grave: “el peligro” dice Alves, “es perder la democracia”.

YAHAIRA BARRERO

Por Samantha Frey Escritora

Adiós, días de nieve. Hola, regreso a la educación virtual

Por Axel Henrriquez Escritor

Durante generaciones, los estudiantes han tomado los días de nieve como un descanso de la escuela. Sin embargo, el pasado 12 de enero, el condado de Montgomery decidió cambiar esto. Cada vez que haya un día de nieve, se espera que los estudiantes asistan a las clases virtuales.

Las escuelas en Maryland necesitan un mínimo de 180 días por año escolar según la ley de Maryland. Antiguamente, si las escuelas necesitaban más días, los añadían al final del año escolar. La forma más común en que una escuela pierde días lectivos es debido a los días de nieve y esa es la razón principal por la que se pasó la medida de los días virtuales de nieve.

“Es importante que los estudiantes experimenten la menor cantidad posible de interrupciones. Por esa razón, MCPS considerará una transición al aprendizaje virtual cuando las escuelas estén cerradas debido a las inclemencias del tiempo”. Esto es lo que dice la página web del condado, que da una breve descripción de cómo funciona el nuevo sistema. Según las nuevas normas, se anunciará que habrá escuela virtual un día antes de que caiga nieve. “Los días tradicionales de nieve siguen siendo una opción”, explica la página web.

La estudiante Ashley Palacios, de onceavo grado, mencionó que, “En cierto modo, siento que es mejor tener días virtuales en lugar de tomar días libres de las vacaciones

de primavera o salir de la escuela más tarde, pero una parte de mí desea que mantengamos los días de nieve”. Sin embargo, comenta que “las familias pueden tener dificultades con los días virtuales porque si sus hijos son pequeños, alguien tiene que cuidarlos, pero los padres tienen que ir a trabajar, y esto podría ser un problema”.

La solución para esto es “que los padres tienen que estar listos para eso y tener a alguien que pueda cuidar del niño y esto tal vez es que necesitan llamar a una niñera o necesita casa, en días vir-

recursos necesarios para esos estudiantes que no tienen internet en la casa”, pero “cómo van a apoyar esas familias, el plan es que les van a dar un aparato que van a poder conectarse al wifi y todo va ser gratis pero eso también invocará un proceso de distribución”.

“Una idea es que pueda ser, en lugar de un día instruccional formal, utilizarlo como un día de “check in” explica Barrera, “Ha nevado, entonces los estudiantes, ese día, podrán utilizarlo como los miércoles que nosotros teníamos, que si necesitas ayuda del profesor estaba ahí durante todo período de la clase para brindar apoyo académico. Para mi seria una solución que entraran los estudiantes que necesitan recuperar trabajo o también que simplemente quieran hablar contigo, o hacer un día de mindfulness minute y eso es como una solución para mí”.

Por Anahí Sanchez-Sanchez Escritora

tuales”.

La señora Barrera, profesora de Blair y la maestra de recursos de idiomas del mundo explica, “Tengo unos sentimientos encontrados … Lo más importante es que los estudiantes van a seguir teniendo una opción para recibir instrucción en casa,” y agrega que “Mi preocupación es la logística. Por ejemplo, sé que se están preparando para apoyar y brindar los

Cuando se piensa en las posibles razones por las que esta medida se está implementando, hay una que parece más probable: “ El condado se preocupa mucho por sus estudiantes, y es por eso que hacen esto”, explicó la Señora Barrera.

Aunque muchas generaciones de estudiantes se han acostumbrado a los días de nieve, este es un nuevo sistema diseñado para ayudar a los estudiantes a tener éxito en un mundo cambiante.

Lleno de Amor

En el mundo culinario, hay varios platillos que surgen de muchas maneras; algunos por accidente, otros por mera imaginación o extravagancia. Sin embargo, nadie puede negar que un platillo que reconforta no solo el estómago, si no también el alma, son las comidas hechas en casa. En este país las cosas se mueven demasiado rápido, al punto que muchas veces nos olvidamos de comer. Sin embargo, una comida que es demasiado fácil de hacer y que hasta incluso quien no ha pisado un pie en la cocina puede preparar, son las empanadas. Empanadas, empanadillas, pastelillos, todos se refieren a un plato común: Un tipo de tortilla rellena con toda clase de cosas, que se dora o se hornea y que además puede ser dulce o salado. La preparación es bastante simple y basta con hacer masa con harina de maíz o trigo, un poco de agua, y sal. Se hacen varias bolitas y se aplanan. Una vez hecho eso, puedes agregar lo que quieras: pollo, res, queso, frijol…Hay una enorme variedad. Para personas que aman lo dulce, pueden probar de mermelada, chocolate, dulce de leche, etc. Hay para todo gusto. Seguidamente, se sellan por las orillas haciendo una pequeña decoración en los bordes. Luego se pone a freír en aceite caliente u hornear por un lapso de tiempo. Seguidamente, aquí hay algunos ejemplos de rellenos que son bastante comunes en los países latinoamericanos: en Argentina existen las tucumanas, una especie de empanada que es hecha en una horno de barro. Su relleno es carne de vaca, cebolla, pimentón, huevo duro y papas. Trasladándonos a Colombia, la tierra cafetera, están las empanadas de Cambray, que están hechas de un interior dulce; se prepara especial-

Por Samantha Frey y Naila Romero-Alston

3. “sus labios están tan _____ como una flor”

5. puedes dar, recibir, o rechazar esta forma de emoción

7. “hershey’s”

8. una ceremonia para unir dos individuos enamorados

10. un órgano en su cuerpo que es un símbolo de amor

11. ¡Ay! La flecha de este bebé, que representa al amor, ha atravesado su corazón

12. Los colores primarios: _____, amarillo, y azul

mente con harina de yuca, relleno de queso, panela y clavos de olor, envueltas en hojas de plátano. Guatemala tiene una empanada muy peculiar: una masa hecha de harina de trigo y harina salpor (solo se encuentra en Guatemala) y achiote para colorear. Con respecto a su relleno, está hecho de leche, maicena, azúcar y canela. En Honduras, las más comunes son las de pollo y las de queso. Seguidamente, en El Salvador, las empanadas son hechas a base de plátano, con un relleno a base de maicena y leche, o frijol. Hay una enorme variedad. Las empanadas, aparte de ser fáciles, son bastante nutritivas, ya que dependiendo del contenido que posea, puede aportar varios nutrientes necesarios para nuestro organismo y son fáciles de digerir, Podemos rellenar a nuestro gusto, y como he dicho al principio, son comidas que nuestras familias latinas hacen y nos recuerdan a nuestra tierra o alguien muy especial para nosotros. Al final de cuentas, una comida como la empanada, con algún que otro acompañamiento, como salsa, lechuga, espolvoreado con queso o rábano cortado en tajitos, hacen que se le derrita la boca a cualquiera con solo imaginarlo u oírlo. Un dato súper curioso es que las empanadas fueron introducidas en Latinoamérica por parte de los españoles, y poco a poco fue evolucionando hasta ser la empanada que conocemos hoy en día. ¡Vaya! ¡Me ha dado hambre de solo mencionar las empanadas! Es parte de la gastronomía latinoamericana, un orgullo latino. El proceso de preparación es bastante sencillo y los ingredientes son asequibles a cualquier persona. Además, al ser una comida hecha en casa con el amor de alguien especial, o por nosotros mismos, es super reconfortante y cálido, como un rayo de sol tímido que atraviesa la ventana mientras el gallo canta anunciando un nuevo día.

1. la fecha en que celebramos el día de San Valentín

2. dos personas enamoradas son llamadas una ______

4. su futuro esposo, una de los dos partes de completan la clave #3

6. el mes en que celebramos el día de San Valentín

9. chocolate, caramelos, todo con azúcar

10. una sonrisa, un abrazo, un beso son gestos de

12. hermosa pero con espinas; es un símbolo de amor

‘One pill can kill’

Where only first names appear, names have been changed to protect the identities of the sources Trigger warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of substance use and discussions of suicide.

“From what my own child has said, [the] flirtation with the risk of death and overdose is what is attractive about fentanyl, and so there’s almost like a badge of honor if you’ve overdosed,” Brenda, the mother of a Blair student battling a substance use disorder, says.

Brenda’s experience is not unique. Overdoses across MCPS have spiked, with 360 percent more youth overdoses in January and February 2023 than the same period last year. Within the Blair community, four students have overdosed in the past 18 months based on parent reports. The bulk of these overdoses are the result of fentanyl.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. The opioid is extremely lethal—just two milligrams can cause a fatal overdose.

Fentanyl is commonly found in pills made to look like authentic opioid prescriptions, including oxycodone (OxyContin/Percocet), alprazolam (Xanax), and stimulants like amphetamines (Adderall). Other illicit drugs, such as heroin and cocaine, can also be laced with fentanyl.

For instance, 83 percent of all Percocet seized and tested in the Montgomery County Police Department (MCPD) Special Investigations Division lab was found to be counterfeit fentanyl pills. Thus, the risk of a fentanyl overdose is imminent to anyone seeking out illicit Percocet.

Fentanyl overdoses community

[overdose], but they’ll still get the feeling of the fentanyl,” she says.

According to Lizzy, those who use fentanyl do not call it by its name, but instead describe it as Percocet or the name of the drug it is disguised inside. “It’s more of a covert way of buying fentanyl, being like ‘can I get a Perc’ instead of ‘can I buy fent,’” she says. This covert identification system seems to diminish the dangerous, and sometimes fatal, impacts of a few milligrams of fentanyl.

Brenda recognizes the prevalence of drug-related behaviors at Blair as well. “I would go to [Blair] at the lunch break time and see the tremendous amount of students outside doing drugs. It was definitely not frowned upon,” she says.

that the end result sometimes is death,” he says.

Personal experiences with addiction

Social pressure, pharmaceutical prescriptions, and mental health issues, alongside a multitude of other factors, can spark a substance use disorder. Blair junior Tyrone details the alleged start of his addiction to Percocets containing fentanyl in November 2022. “I’m not gonna accept every single thing someone hands me. But if it piques my interest, then I’m gonna say f--- it, I’ll try it for once.”

Tyrone was allegedly addicted along with his friends. “[Percocets] did play a part in our daily basis of things we could do. We’re eating, we’ll [take Percocets] after. It just sort of came with everything,” he says.

Number of youth overdoses during the first 45 days of each year

organization Mitchell co-founded following her son’s opioid use disorder, also held a family fentanyl forum at Clarksburg on Jan. 28. The event aimed to raise awareness, disseminate informational resources on fentanyl, and engage directly with the community on the substance abuse crisis.

Although much of MCPS’ initial communication about fentanyl, including Kapunan’s December letter, described overdoses as accidental, Picerno clarified at the forum that use of the illicit substance could also be intentional. “At the forum… I was happy to hear from [Picerno]— this was sort of the first time that I had heard the message that kids who are taking pills are taking pills knowing that there’s fentanyl mixed in and wanting to get that fentanyl,” Brenda says.

The Special Investigations Division works with the county to track overdoses of current and former MCPS students under the age of 21. Nick Picerno, Director of the Special Investigations Division, explains that the youth’s attraction to fentanyl has increased over the years and that many teenagers are now intentionally seeking out the opioid. “There was [a] 120 percent increase in fatal overdoses involving youth [from 2021–2022]… Kids are actively seeking these pills,” Picerno says in an interview with Silver Chips.

According to Picerno, the early 2000s saw an increase in opioid abuse due to overprescription of pain management pills such as OxyContin. As OxyContin prices steadily rose during the 2010s due to increasing demand, many shifted to using heroin, only to be met with a similar price jump. Around 2013, fentanyl moved to the forefront of the illicit drug scene. “What drug cartels started doing was taking advantage of [those with] addiction issues. They [imported] fentanyl from labs in China into Mexico [and put] fentanyl inside of heroin to make it stronger,” Picerno explains.

A culture of substance use

Drug culture has become much more extreme over the years, particularly as social media has grown. “[With] people in TV shows or people you see on the internet… everything is normalized now—all the most extreme behaviors are normalized. I feel like the whole culture around it is so toxic,” Blair sophomore Lizzy explains.

Lizzy details the process of using fentanyl in the form of a counterfeit Percocet, drawing on her alleged experience around those who use the drug intentionally. “People take crumbs of a Percocet—they’ll chop up the Percocet and they’ll have tiny pieces of it so that they don’t

Drug culture has also shifted to a younger audience. Brenda describes how her child’s substance use began at Silver Spring International Middle School. “My child was at Silver Spring International… The P.E. facility is outside… so students take advantage of that opportunity to walk out the doors and text their drug dealers… That’s the history of how my child was easily able to get drugs during the school day,” she explains.

Laura Mitchell is a mother whose son struggled with an opioid use disorder after being prescribed opioids for an injury at age 15. “We were all being told [that these opioids] were safe, they were good, they treated the pain… and then I later learned that his doctor was prescribing hundreds of pills every month on a cycle, and it became a really big problem,” she says.

The physical toll of addiction and withdrawal is agonizing.

Lizzy describes her alleged experience being close to her friend struggling with a fentanyl addiction. “My best friend was talking about how it feels like the world is giving you a hug… and then when you’re out of it, it feels like hell,” Lizzy says. Immediately halting consumption of any opioid is excruciating. “The withdrawals are hell. You’re itching all over your body to the point where you’re bleeding… I remember I used to have to scratch [my friend’s] back… because she was going through withdrawals and I would do it happily because I knew that meant she was off of [fentanyl],” Lizzy says.

Lizzy describes that same friend’s alleged experience with suicide in correlation to her substance use. “I remember one time we went to go ice skating and she forgot her forty dollars, and she was like ‘I need those forty dollars to buy a Perc,’ and she breaks down crying right on the street right in front of me and she was like, ‘I was gonna kill myself with that Perc,’” she says.

The highs and withdrawals of opioid use are not where the emotional, mental, and physical impacts of addiction end. Substance abuse is long-lasting, and the process of seeking treatment can be immensely challenging. According to American Addiction Centers, 91 percent of those in recovery from opioid addiction experience a relapse.

MCPS response

Lizzy describes her alleged experience watching her younger sister enter this culture of substance abuse upon starting middle school. “On her little donut iPad case, she’s talking about drugs with her friends… It’s getting younger; it keeps getting younger,” she says.

Jordan Satinsky, Captain of the MCPD Community Engagement Division, highlights his concerns regarding youth experimentation. “The average age is 14 or 15 for our users and overdoses… It’s the ripe age to try these things and be experimental… I don’t think they realize

When overdoses began to spike earlier this year, leaders within the MCPS community worked to respond to the crisis. “Our most important role as a school system is to support students in having the opportunities and skills to create the world in which they want to live. This is why we continue to engage parents and students about the dangers of illicit fentanyl and what they can do as community members to help,” Superintendent of Schools Dr. Monifa McKnight wrote in an email to Silver Chips.

On Dec. 9, MCPS Chief Medical Officer Dr. Patricia Kapunan sent a letter to the community asserting that fentanyl use was becoming a more widespread issue in Montgomery County and offering resources to parents and students.

MCPS and Montgomery Goes Purple, an

Brenda feels that the forum was a positive first step in addressing the fentanyl crisis, as it was the beginning of MCPS and other county organizations working together to hold an open dialogue and spread awareness. “I’m optimistic about the momentum from [the] forum. I don’t want that to be a one-and-done kind of thing. If it goes forward in that direction, I think that that’s going to help address [this problem],” she says.

Narcan has been another key component of the county response to this crisis. Medically known as naloxone, the antidote attaches to opioid receptors in the body and can rapidly reverse the effects of an opioid overdose. The Narcan kept in MCPS schools and distributed to the community is administered through a nasal spray. At Blair, the nurse and all security guards are trained to administer Narcan, as are at least three additional staff members chosen by the principal per MCPS policy.

The Jan. 28 forum also included an open Q&A session with an expert panel and a training on Narcan administration led by Montgomery County Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) Prevention and Harm Reduction Manager Ben Stevenson. Along with Narcan training, DHHS provides education sessions in MCPS schools on an ad hoc basis and free Narcan to anyone who requests it.

Currently, Narcan is placed in all MCPS health rooms, and Narcan trainings are available to all staff, but the medicine is not authorized for students to handle in an emergency situation or carry at school.

Kapunan is working alongside other Montgomery County officials to create countywide policies that would allow students to carry Narcan at school as an official emergency medication. “We’re in the process of crafting a policy, but we do want students to know about [Narcan] and have access to it,” Kapunan says in an interview with Silver Chips.

Although MCPS has facilitated community conversations on fentanyl, there is still a lack of resources for those currently struggling. Aneisha, a parent of an MCPS student struggling with substance use, has been repeatedly redirected when trying to seek help from Montgomery County support systems. “They would just keep giving me [another] phone number. So one person gives me a phone number and then that person will call me and give me another phone number,” Aneisha explains.

Brenda also struggled to access county resources that would support her child. “When we first went to the [Montgomery County] Crisis Center, we left with a long list of places to call to identify therapists that could work with my child. Nearly every number on there was either incorrect or they just weren’t taking patients for ten months, so it was almost like a non-resource because there’s just no place to bring teens,” she recalls.

GRAPHIC BY JULIA LIAN | DATA COURTESY OF MCPD

[Percocets] did play a part in our daily basis of things we could do. We’re eating, we’ll [take Percocets] after. It just sort of came with everything.

BLAIR DEMONSTRATION ment of Health and shared information on

overdoses spur a grieving community into action

Another common hurdle for those seeking help with substance use is stigma. “There’s so much stigma that creates these barriers to people even feeling like they deserve help, they deserve recovery, much less to ask for it or accept it when it’s offered,” Mitchell says.

Our primary tenet is not to arrest a victim or anyone who is calling us to tell us there is a victim… We’re not looking at [them] as a suspect.

At Blair, Principal Renay Johnson has coordinated with other DCC middle and high schools and provided an optional Narcan administration training to Blair teachers. During the week of Feb. 21–24, the Blair counseling department also held Blair IMPACT Week: Substance Use Awareness. The week included activities, guest speakers, and class discussions centered around understanding the substance abuse crisis and ways to support those struggling with addiction.

In early January, Johnson took all doors off of bathrooms to improve student safety. Johnson sees the “stadium-style bathrooms” as a way to help combat fatalities from overdoses. “If the door is open and I walk by and I see someone’s lying down, I’m going to get involved, my staff will get involved, other students may get involved. So, at this time, we’ll keep stadium-style bathrooms because we want to save a life,” Johnson explains.

to respond to overdose incidents in schools.

Although the MCPD works with overdose victims to provide support and gain information, victims are not their investigational target. “For the most part, [we] go down the road to target the dealer,” Satinksy explains. “Our primary tenet is not to arrest a victim or anyone who is calling us to tell us there is a victim… We’re not looking at [them] as a suspect.”

Another aspect of the legal approach to overdose is Maryland’s Good Samaritan Law, which protects anyone assisting in an overdose or other emergency medical situation from arrest and prosecution of certain crimes. Johnson urges students to be aware of the law to possibly save a peer’s life. “If you’re at home or at a party and someone is unresponsive, call 911 and report it… You are saving a life and you can’t be prosecuted for that,” she emphasizes.

The impacts and fatalities of the opioid epidemic are not exclusive to MCPS. Nationwide, fentanyl-related fatal overdoses saw a 59 percent increase from 2019 to 2020, and have only risen in the years since. This crisis has impacted all of the country, and as a response, MCPD works alongside other police departments to coordinate initiatives targeting drug cartels. “There is not a wall around Montgomery County,” Picerno explains. Strategizing with other police departments creates coordinated efforts to combat the crisis in more efficient ways.

All departments under MCPD are also part of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, a group of the 79 largest police departments throughout North America that remains in constant communication on issues like the fentanyl crisis. “So we generally will come to a meeting and we do intelligence sharing across [the Major Cities Chiefs Association],” Picerno explains.

The MCPD and MCPS addressed the youth opiate crisis with the Montgomery County Council on Monday, Feb. 27. DHHS was also present at the hearing, and provided a space for county leaders to create a cohesive strategy to combat this crisis. Following the hearing, the county added more detailed content on opioid overdose and fentanyl to health curriculums.

Police response

Beyond collaborating to host forums, the county works with MCPD to address the fentanyl crisis. According to the 2022 Memorandum of Understanding between MCPS and MCPD, if there is a drug overdose or evidence of drug distribution at school, administration is required to inform the police.

“[MCPS is] legally obligated to report to get the person help. When they do that, it triggers the police department, as well as fire and rescue, because we have a primary double responsibility to making sure the victim survives… [and] we have an obligation to follow [up] investigatively to see where [the drugs] came from and hopefully target the dealer to dry up the source [of the illicit drug],” Satinsky says.

Satinsky supervises community engagement officers (CEOs) who are stationed at MCPS high schools as MCPD liaisons and trained in emergency preparedness. CEOs are certified to carry and administer Narcan and are typically the first

In a later interview, Picerno notes that the number of overdose events within the county seems to be stagnating. “Since the [forum], we have definitely seen a slowdown, which is a good thing,” he says. Picerno attributes this decline to the work of the entire county to amplify support resources and educate citizens.

Acknowledging the fentanyl crisis this way can help dispel stigma surrounding those struggling with substance use. Andrea Maples, a Blair teacher who lost her son to overdose, explains that prejudice can discourage people from reaching out for assistance. “It can be anybody. People have looked at [those struggling] with substance abuse as being moral failures, and they’re not… [We] really [need] to break stigmas, because people aren’t going to get the help they need.”

Scan this QR code to access Blair’s community resources

Art by Eliza Cooke

Photos by Margo Buehler and Jonathan Cumblidge

Design by Dyan Nguyen and Nora Pierce

Story by Della Baer, Zoë Kaiser, Julia Lian, and Ila Raso

JORDAN SATINSKY

DEMONSTRATION On Feb. 9, Ben Stevenson, Montgomery County Departand Human Services Prevention and Harm Reduction Manager, on the use of Narcan with the Blair community.

CLARKSBURG On Jan. 28, MCPS held a family forum on fentanyl that offered attendees the opportunity to learn how to administer Narcan.

Stronger Student MCPS releases app for students to report sexual misconduct

By Sachini Adikari and Parineeka Shrestha Staff Writers

Up until the second semester of the 2022–2023 school year, reporting incidents of sexual misconduct or harassment in MCPS involved a seven-step process that was inaccessible to many students. “The reporting process was highly bureaucratic, dispersonal, frustrating to get through, and [students] felt like it didn’t go anywhere. It just went into a black hole and they had no idea if their complaint was being taken seriously, if anything was being done about it, [or] if anything was being investigated,” Board of Education (BOE) At-Large member Lynne Harris explains.

In the summer of 2020, MCPS faced a countywide wave of sexual misconduct allegations. Silver Chips alumni Anika Seth, Kathryn LaLonde, and Aviva Bechky, who were staff members at the time, recall seeing classmates turn to Instagram to share their experiences, and became concerned that social media was becoming the primary resource students were using. “As reporters, we asked the question of, ‘why are students using social media to come forward with these very traumatic stories [rather than] the official routes that already exist through the county?’” Seth explains.

The three took it upon themselves to further research alternative methods of reporting misconduct. Through Silver Chips,

Bechky was able to investigate how student reports were handled at Blair. “I ended up writing a story about how [sexual harassment reporting] had played out at Blair with Annie Goldman… We talked to a bunch of people who had tried to report harassment to the school and who had been treated very poorly, whose complaints had never been investigated, [and] who had never been supported,” Bechky says.

After publishing that story in October 2020, Seth, LaLonde, and Bechky concluded that the process had to change. “We began to learn that there was a lack of awareness on what tools were in place in the county to use for reporting,” Seth says.

The three

worked with Harris, whom they had previously tapped for interviews as student journalists, to push for a countywide solution. “We ended up talking to board member Lynne about what was going on, how we could change things… [and] forming a task force of people across the county who were interested in advocating to change [the] policy around reporting,” Bechky says. After connecting with Harris in 2020, the two-year-long app development process began.

Harris helped the trio find MCPS grant money that was allotted for projects like theirs and suggested that it could help fund the student-run initiative. “I found, inside one of the memos around grant funding, that there was an item for MCPS to receive a $20,000 grant from the Maryland Center for School Safety to create a student reporting app,” Harris says. “I pulled the item [for discussion]... and I just said to [people at a BOE meeting discussing the grant]... ‘Why don’t you just team [up] to pick up where they already are in this process?’”

Harris helped the three network and pushed for the app herself. “I was involved in connecting them with other advocates and allies; [I put] them in touch with the folks at the Family Justice Center and also [connected] them with the team inside MCPS,” she says.

With Harris’ help, Seth, LaLonde, and Bechky made an official proposal to MCPS officials.

“We presented [the app] to the technology office and [the] Title IX [coordinator] and all these other offices… and they wanted to work with us and support us in this project because they felt like this was a really important issue,” LaLonde says.

The three found that MCPS was already interested in having an app to respond to bullying, harassment, and any hate bias within schools, so after graduating in 2021, Seth and LaLonde began working for MCPS to aid in developing the app and were given stipends for their efforts. “We did transition from being students to employees of the county. So our freshman year of college, we were essentially hired by MCPS… We became temporary employees to develop [the app],” LaLonde says.

While the primary focus of the app is for students to easily access online reporting forms, it also includes a multitude of student mental health resources and explanations of student rights. “[The app] gives you resources within the county and within the state, and also national resources for dealing with issues like mental health, survivors’ rights, queer [and] mental health support… We have detailed pages explaining Title IX rights, Know Your Nine… [and]

the school district’s different board policies for bullying, harassment, and sexual harassment,” LaLonde explains.

We asked the question of, ‘why are students using social media to come forward with these very traumatic stories [rather than] the official routes that already exist through the county?

Seth and LaLonde hope that the app will create a sense of ease for students when it comes to reporting incidents. “The idea behind an app is also that it gives students a more discreet option where I could be texting on my phone, I could be on Canvas… [and] no one else [around me] is going to know, there’s no awkward conversation about what you’re doing,” Seth says. “That also gives students more control over their narrative and their own healing process.”

LaLonde believes that the app will give students a sense of authority in the process of reporting. “We want students to feel empowered to be able to report without feeling like they don’t have any control in the process,” LaLonde says.

MCPS Stronger Student was released on Feb. 1 and is now available in English and Spanish to all MCPS students through both the Apple and Google Play stores.

Montgomery County businesses thrive under Black ownership

Miskiri Enterprises

Blair alumnus Jason Miskiri made his first mark on the restaurant industry just miles away from his childhood home in Takoma

Inspired by the success of local entrepreneurs, Miskiri decided to open his restaurants in Downtown Silver Spring. “I grew up in Tako-

Spring since its 2012 launch. Its newest project, The Breakfast Club, opened in December 2022 and is already one of Eater D.C.’s Top 14 Hottest New Restaurants. The restaurant offers all-day brunch menu items, from vanilla bean French toast to seafood deviled eggs.

Miskiri aims to establish a successful future for his family through his businesses. “[I want to be] able to set up my family to start generational wealth. That’s one big reason why I’m doing this, to leave a legacy and a financial economic setup for my kids,” Miskiri says.

Bespoke Not Broke

James Hackley has also found success establishing his business in Takoma Park—his niche is clothing. He opened his vintage boutique, Bespoke Not Broke, in 2019. “[Takoma Park is] just a perfect place… for vintage. It has a long history of vintage, and folks appreciate it around here,” Hackley says.

Hackley first conceived the idea for his vintage resale shop when he had to part with his own pricey apparel. “I lost a lot of weight and I had a lot of expensive stuff that I couldn’t wear anymore. I vowed when I lost the weight, I would never spend that much money on clothing again,” he says. “So I started thrifting [and] going to resale shops. And [when for] about the hundredth time, someone asked me, ‘where did I get that?’

[I thought], well, this is a business potential. So we started at Fenton Street Market in Silver Spring, just outside in the open air market.”

Bespoke Not Broke offers a

wide variety of reasonably-priced luxury items for a diverse target customer base, which makes the store unique. “There are a lot of resale shops around, but not too many resale shops focus on men, women, and children,” Hackley says.

Black Viking Brewing

Black Viking Brewing offers another unique product, serving as Montgomery County’s first and only golden beer brand. The Gaithersburg brewing company was founded by Shaun Taylor and Jamil Abdur-Raoof during the summer of 2020.

One of the company’s standout products is a golden ale brewed with ginger and honey called Zingabier, a play on the scientific name for ginger. What makes Zingabier beer unique is its low percentage of alcohol by volume. “We felt like with Zingabier beer, we had something that could help us in building a community, because it’s light but [has] a unique twist on it with the ginger and the honey in there that makes

it flavorful, a little bit different, [and not]... too off-putting to the everyday beer drinker,” Taylor says.

The U.S.’s lack of Black-owned breweries motivated Taylor and Abdur-Raoof’s decision to start their company. “When I started really thinking about getting into the business [10 years ago], I saw that there weren’t a lot of Black-owned breweries in the country. As a matter of fact, Black-owned breweries account for less than one percent of breweries nationwide,” Taylor explains. “When I saw that, I was very inspired to get into the business.”

Taylor has high hopes for the future of his company as one of the nation’s only Black-owned brewing companies. “We are working towards our goal of becoming the country’s first Black-owned nationally distributed beer brand,” he says.

Similarly, Miskiri looks forward to the future of his enterprise and the growth of the Black-owned business scene in Maryland. “I’m just excited and happy to be a part of the journey and I know there’s a lot more to come,” he says.

PHOTOS BY MARIN LEDERER

JAMES HACKLEY The owner of Bespoke Not Broke in Takoma Park.

DAMI KIM

Artifical intelligence: a copyright-mare

By Sasha Vesensky Staff Writer

A dachshund playing a guitar in outer space, Picasso style. A shark setting off fireworks in Antarctica, rendered in stained glass. These are examples of prompts that The Washington Post used to test artificial intelligence (AI) art generators—a rapidly advancing technology that has become highly contentious, especially among artists, for its sweeping and yet unchecked use of human-made source materials.

AI art generators like Stable Diffusion are called “diffusion models.” They scan through thousands of images on the internet to learn patterns, key phrases, and visual representations that they use to generate new images. While there is an

train models without permission or compensation.

Sarah Andersen, the creator of the webcomic “Sarah’s Scribbles,” wrote a guest opinion in The New York Times published on Dec. 31, 2022 describing her frustration upon seeing that her artwork was used to train AI art generators. “I felt violated. The way I draw is the complex culmination of my education, the comics I devoured as a child and the many small choices that make up the sum of my life,” she writes. “Art is deeply personal, and A.I. had just erased the hu manity from it by reducing my life’s work to an algorithm.”

Andersen and two other artists, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, are suing Stability AI, the creator of Stable Diffusion, for copyright infringe ment. Their com plaint points out that anyone is able to access copied art without commis sioning it directly, meaning that the original artists lose money.

is Senior Legal Counsel at the Student Press Law Center, where he has worked for about 30 years. He says that since AI is a new consideration, new laws will have to be passed in order to determine the outcome of these types of court cases. “This is kind of a new beast,” he says. “Judges are probably going to be imploring lawmakers to step up to the plate and actually pass laws that will help decide these things.”

According to Hiestand, an

“There was some discussion about if you got really specific in giving the command, very creative… does [that] fact… rise to any sort of [level where you could] copyright [it] because the human did it?” he says.

“Could you actually copyright the command that you’re giving to AI to come up with the work?”

Many artists have also grappled with this issue and arrived at similar conclusions. V Zimlich-Vázquez is a senior at Walter Johnson and a student artist who believes that art generated purely through AI loses its meaning. “AI art is really monotonous. It basically just averages out thousands and thousands of different artworks on the internet and it doesn’t create new ideas,” they say. “The main thing about being an artist is that you can create new ideas with a personal voice and intent. AI art does not have a personal voice—it essentially steals that personal voice from an artist or from thousands of artists and makes it a hollow husk of a voice.”

One such artist who has chosen to embrace AI as an artistic tool is London-based Anna Ridler, who trained her own AI generator with

[AI art] basically just averages out thousands and thousands of different artworks on the internet and it doesn’t create new ideas.

incredible range of applications for this technology, many artists are concerned that AI companies— many of which charge their users to generate art—are using their work to

“The harm to artists is not hypothetical—works generated by AI Image Products ‘in the style’ of a particular artist are already sold on the internet, siphoning commissions from the artists themselves,” the document reads.

However, the lawsuit may struggle to find litigative footing, as AI-generated content is a legal gray area at the moment. Mike Hiestand

im - age that has been completely created by AI currently cannot be copyrighted. “The U.S. Copyright Offices just determined that they are not going to register works that have no human component to [them],” he says. “So anything that’s completely generated by AI.” However, he adds that there could be exceptions to the rule in cases where there was more human ingenuity involved.

However, Zimlich-Vázquez also believes that AI can be used in an ethical way to avoid plagiarism. They pointed out how artists can use it to alter their own work.

“There are a lot of artists now who are using AI art and inserting their own images… so there’s no plagiarism involved, but it does create a very interesting piece,” they say.

“The person that’s creating it is using it as a medium [in this case].”

Evaluating our educators

a series of tulip photographs by using photos she took throughout the spring. Another artist, Robbie Barrat, collaborated with artist Ronan Barrot to run Barrot’s skull paintings through a generator to produce an infinite amount of AI-generated skulls based on Barrot’s style. The piece is called “BARRAT/BARROT: Infinite Skulls – An unprecedented encounter between a painter and an artist researcher in artificial intelligence” and presents a blending of new and old art techniques.

Many people view AI in general as something that should be accepted as an inevitable part of the future. “I don’t know where we’re headed,” Hiestand says. “I think that the rules of the game are going to be completely changed, and we’ll have to keep up with that.”

County program keeps tenured teachers up to standard

from PGS page A1

learning environment, teaching effectively and comprehensively, and talking to students in an appropriate manner, among other criteria.

Assistant School Administrator Rahman Culver explains that there are six total standards that evaluators will look for during an observation. “[Some] primarily refer to instructional practices within the classroom [and others are] more about general professionalism in the quorum, and the idea is that on a regular cycle... every teacher has to be observed and evaluated on how well they meet those standards,” he says.

Because a teacher may not be able to display all six standards in a single class period, Culver’s job as an evaluator is not to look for specific adherences but rather that the teacher is generally capable of meeting the county’s performance standards.

Teachers who meet MCPS standards have their assessment reports submitted to MCPS and continue teaching. “[Final reports are] ultimately shared with the county, and then [the evaluated] teacher remains in good standing,” Culver says.

On the other hand, if a teacher’s report determines that they are not up to par, the department process begins and they are referred to the PGS department, which assigns them a consulting teacher (CT)—a tenured MCPS teacher who has been selected through a rigorous application process to help other educators meet county standards.

According to Assistant Principal Joseph Fanning, who was a CT and later a PGS department co-lead from 2014–2019, teachers who receive does-not-meet-standard evaluations can appeal their evaluation results to MCPS’ Peer Assistance

and Review (PAR) panel, which is composed of eight MCPS teachers and eight MCPS administrators. “[The teacher] could say ‘Hey,... [the evaluation] doesn’t meet the requirements,’ or they could just say ‘Hey, the observers were wrong,’ or there could be some extenuating circumstance,” Fanning explains.

with evaluation standards.

According to Christopher Klein, who was a MCPS CT from 2018–2021, each CT can expect a typical caseload of around 20 teachers every school year. CTs use a variety of methods to support and help their teachers, including classroom observation; targeted, standards-based feedback; performance coaching; collaborative lesson planning; and student score assessment. “[The CT and the teacher] can also go on organized peer visits, where [we] go observe another teacher who is teaching either the same or a different subject… and then talk about what was effective or ineffective,” Klein says.

Nikki Woodward, the current Vice President of the PAR panel, says that the frequency of a teacher’s meetings with their CT depends largely on their progress.

aim to see [the teacher ideally] every week, but typically it’ll be more like every two weeks,” Klein explains.

After a year of continuous support from a CT and observation from a pair of PAR panel members, one teacher and one principal, the teacher is then re-evaluated based on the year of observations. The teacher is either able to return to teaching in schools, or may require an extra year of PAR assistance.

“We look at the data that the CT has collected over the year; with their recommendation, sometimes [the teacher] is so close to doing so great [but] they need another year of coaching and support,” Woodward explains. “Sometimes it’s actually this person [was]

cycle.”

Regardless of teacher performance, however, school administrators and the PGS department will always ensure that students are receiving a quality educational experience, according to Woodward. “[There are] safeguards in place to make sure that [the teachers are] coached and that they’re feeling that they’re improving upon their skill set and their performance to ensure that the students are receiving the sound education that they deserve,” she says.

Assistant Principal Lavina Carrillo explains that the county only wants to see teachers succeed and improve. “It’s such a great system that the county has; it doesn’t seem like a ‘gotcha,’ or ‘we want to see teachers fail’... The goal of the ments and growth,” she

If the panel agrees with the teacher’s appeal, then the evaluation is discarded. However, if the panel agrees with the evaluation results, the case then returns to the PGS department.

Fanning explains that the PGS process starts with a thorough examination of the teacher’s evaluation history. “There’s a group that meets and literally goes through and checks all the variable Ps and Qs to make sure, ‘Hey, were there two observations? Were the dates correct? Did one of them happen the first semester and one in the second?’ They really try to go through with a fine-tooth comb to ensure [everything’s] correct,” he says.

Once the evaluation has been confirmed as valid, the department matches a teacher in need with a CT, who works with the teacher extensively to help them reconcile

“When [the teacher] is underper forming, [they] probably [receive the] consultant teacher…weekly un til [they] start to demonstrate some successes… [The frequency of visits] can vary, be [the CT wants] to give [the teacher] time to take in feedback, exam ine their scope of work, and then implement that feedback,” she explains.

Over the course of a school year, the CT will try to meet with a teacher as much as they can, which typically results in biweek ly meetings with a teacher. “When you’re a consult ing teacher, you

Judges are probably going to be imploring lawmakers to step up to the plate and actually pass laws that will help decide these things.

MIKE HIESTAND

LUCIA WANG

When [the teacher] is underperforming, [they] probably [receive the] consultant teacher… weekly until [they] start to demonstrate some successes.

NIKKI WOODWARD

Blazers teaching Blazers

By Amen Lemiesa and Parineeka Shrestha Staff Writers

“[Getting academic support from BLISS tutoring] was the best decision… [of] my life,” Blair junior Mitchell Morris says. After struggling with his chemistry class, Morris turned to BLISS, a peer tutoring service at Blair, and saw drastic improvements in his grades, nearly achieving an A after receiving a C first quarter.

In addition to BLISS, Blair hosts a variety of academic support programs that proactive students take advantage of for support with schoolwork.

Student participation in such programs is more necessary than ever, with 2022 math scores throughout MCPS evincing the pandemic’s lingering effects on education. K-12 student report cards and standardized testing for the 2021–2022 school year saw 38.8 percent of students failing to meet expectations.

This learning loss is clear in the classroom—Blair math teacher William Rose had to lower expectations for his post-pandemic students. “I definitely changed the way I did things last year because I assumed that students didn’t learn everything they were supposed to learn.”

Though Morris’ struggles lay in chemistry class rather than math, he still experienced difficulties first

quarter, when his teacher’s delivery was not resonating with him, until he tried BLISS. “Whatever my teacher was teaching just was not working, but hearing it from another student immediately just helped,” he says. Many agree that peer tutoring provides a more casual setting that better suits some students’ needs.

“Students are more responsive to the other students compared to teachers… It’s a more comfortable environment,” junior Alexander Groen, a tutor for the Math Honor Society (MHS), explains. Programs like MHS and BLISS can be beneficial for not only tutees, but also their tutors. “[Peer tutoring] allows tutors to review what they have learned and what they know,” National Honor Society teacher sponsor Hannah Coleman says. Student-to-student teaching also exemplifies community service and pushes students to interact in an educational setting. “It’s beneficial for the students that are tutoring because it just helps them to give back to the community… and builds a better, stronger academic community,” she continues.

Coleman values the variety of academic support programs available outside of the classroom, including those offered by math, English, foreign language, and music honor societies, for the extra outlet they provide for students who are not as confident reaching out to their own teachers. “I think that having different academic support programs is

really nice… While we would love for [students] to feel comfortable going to their teachers, it’s not always something that they feel comfortable doing, so I think that it’s beneficial to the students that need help to have different options available to them,” she says.

Another such program, the George B. Thomas Sr. Learning Academy’s Saturday School, has been active in Montgomery County since 1986. The program hires certified teachers to provide academic tutoring for K-12 students and returned to in-person sessions for the 2022–2023 school after remaining completely virtual during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The school currently offers open academic support and SAT prep classes for high school-aged students across the county taught by board-certified teachers and volunteer student tutors. The Blair branch opened in 2016 and is led by Assistant Principal Rahman Culver, who is serving his second year as the program’s branch director.

Culver emphasizes that student tutors are uniquely important because they can relate to and encourage their peers. “Students feel that ‘there’s just no way that I’m ever going to understand this,’ but when you’re working with someone you conceivably could have a lot in common with, it can give some additional motivation,” he says.

Though the accessibility and comfort of peer tutoring may appeal more to students, the advantag-

es of teacher-led lessons lie in their professionalism. Culver points out that teachers bring extensive backgrounds in education to the classroom that students lack. “[Adult teachers have] had the training, they’ve had the experience, and are very well positioned to provide a deeper insight as to how to help students grasp information, particularly if it’s challenging,” he explains.

Math teacher and Math Honor Society sponsor Grace Contreras recognizes the differences between how teachers help students and how students help their peers. “[Teachers are] helping in a professional, teacher mindset where

Programming from prison

By Talia Egnal and Sophie Yohannan Staff Writers

A class sits in front of laptops, puzzling over lines of code. Parked in a corner of each screen is the same face—the teacher, calling in via Zoom—explaining how to program a website. These students are learning the tech and computer literacy skills they will need out in the real world, but unlike the typical pupil, they are not preparing to graduate high school or college—dressed in orange jumpsuits, they will instead be released from prison.

With 2.3 million people held in jails, prisons, and detention facilities, the U.S. has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world. In Maryland alone, 36,000 people are incarcerated per the 2020 U.S. Census.

An inmate’s struggles do not end with their sentence. Former convicts often face difficulties finding work again for a variety of reasons, including stigma in the hiring process and limited educational opportunities behind bars. In 2018, over 27 percent of formerly incarcerated people were unemployed compared to 5.3 percent

for the general population.

Brave Behind Bars, a digital literacy program from The Educational Justice Institute (TEJI) at MIT, aims to address this issue by equipping prison detainees with basic computer science and career-readiness skills, preparing them for the modern workplace. The initiative held its first classes in the summer of 2021 and was primarily aimed at helping female detainees, many of whom face more difficulties finding work after prison than their male counterparts. 43.6 percent of formerly incarcerated Black women and 40 percent of formerly incarcerated Hispanic women are unable to find jobs after their sentence. In 2022, the program expanded to help educate detainees of all genders.

Brave Behind Bars takes a reconstructive approach to incarceration that focuses primarily on longterm outcomes. “The way that the criminal justice system seems to me is more punitive—focused on not necessarily rehabilitating people but incarcerating them for the sake of punishment,” Marisa Gaetz, one of the three MIT graduate students who founded Brave Behind Bars, explains. “There’s not a lot of val-

ue in punishment for punishment’s sake, and it would be better to give people options to better their lives… It’s much better to have them be released as people who have new skills or new passions.”

Volunteer coaches help introduce detainees to these skills and passions through classes held over Zoom. “A lot of people enter the class with not a ton of comfort with using computers… [and] these skills are really important in the modern workplace, especially using Zoom and basic things like that. I think having that kind of renewed sense of confidence and those practical computer skills can be really helpful,” Gaetz says.

Gaetz and the program’s two other founders, Martin Nisser and Emily Harburg, met serendipitously in 2020. At the time, Nisser was a grad student working at TEJI, Gaetz was a PhD student studying math at MIT, and Harburg was co-founder of Brave Initiatives, a camp teaching girls technology design and leadership. With Harburg’s curriculum and a shared determination to better the U.S. prison system, the three launched Brave Behind Bars in September 2020.

Historically, computers and

we make you think a lot, whereas the peer tutors tend to be a little bit more direct in answering questions.”

Receiving academic support outside of the classroom can make learning new content straightforward and stress-free. “There are no requirements… All you have to do is come in and ask for help,” Coleman says, “and either the sponsor there will be willing to point you in the direction of an [adult] tutor or a friendly [student] tutor like an upperclassman, or we’ll come on over and ask if you want any help.”

MIT initiative equips inmates with digital literacy skills

internet access have been hard to come by in correctional facilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, they became more widespread as communication with the outside world became harder in person. These computers also became critical for detainees to participate in online college programs. “Around the time that COVID started, more computers seemed to be introduced into correctional facilities… and so we had the idea of trying to do remote classes,” Gaetz recalls.

passionate about solving. “We’ve had groups of women work on websites that help address domestic violence, so they compile resources for women or victims of domestic violence. We’ve had some students work on websites trying to prevent gun violence and all sorts of really amazing and impactful things,” Gaetz remarks.

The Brave Behind Bars team also aims to reduce recidivism—the tendency of former convicts to reoffend and return to prison—through the employable skills that their students acquire. As the organization’s website shares, 83 percent of all former convicts return to prison within nine years of release. Educational programs like Brave Behind Bars, however, have been shown to reduce recidivism by 43 percent.

In the summer of 2021, Brave Behind Bars launched its pilot program, enrolling 25 students from four New England correctional facilities. A year later, they were running a 40-person, 12-week course that now included 16 inmates from a D.C. jail. The program met twice a week over Zoom, culminating in a Sept. 8 graduation ceremony that saw representatives from both Howard University, Georgetown University, and Microsoft in attendance.

The programs begin with instruction on basic internet skills, like adding text to a website with HTML, before moving on to more complex coding languages. “We don’t require any prerequisites, aside from very basic familiarity with computers. We start off with some really basic websites… then, we introduce some CSS,” Gaetz explains. “Once they’ve built some familiarity with those things, we also teach them some more advanced skills, like some JavaScript.”

These courses culminate in a final website that the inmates build, typically focused on issues in the students’ communities that they are

There are further plans for expanding technology access inside of correctional facilities. In 2020, Congress lifted the 1994 moratorium on federal funds to college-in-prison programs. Beginning in 2023, funds such as Pell Grants— federal need-based financial aid for undergraduate education—will be available to 64 percent of the incarcerated population. The grant can reach up to $6,495 for the 2023 school year—money that could go to new computers and tablets, giving inmates access to the wealth of coding and technology knowledge on the internet.

The hope is for detainees to take advantage of these resources and develop expertise that translates into employment opportunities upon their release. Gaetz explains that the future of Brave Behind Bars would ideally involve more industry partners to establish a more direct path to employment for detainees. “We’d like to have a pipeline from inside the correctional facilities into employment, where [inmates are] learning a sequence of skills and then have a program that really prepares them for

she says.

GRAPHIC BY TALIA EGNAL | DATA COURTESY OF PRISON POLICY INITIATIVE

PHOTO BY SAMMY GALLUN

MATH HONOR SOCIETY Small group tutoring underway led by Ms. Contreras.

It’s much better to have [inmates] be released as people who have new skills or new passions.

MARISA GAETZ

Presenting: George Pelecanos

The Silver Spring native’s new AFI show looks back on change in Hollywood and his own life

By Teddy Curtin Staff Writer

Prolific crime novelist, “The Wire” screenwriter, and lifelong Silver Spring resident George Pelecanos has compiled an eight-part series of throwback films that will be played at the American Film Institute (AFI) in Downtown Silver Spring from Feb. 6 to April 21.

Long before Pelecanos and the works he features were given the spotlight, Pelecanos was someone who loved film and found himself engrossed in the rapidly changing movie media landscape of the seventies. His collection of films at AFI, despite their different plots, characters, and settings, all embody the filmmaking renaissance of the decade, which questioned the conventions of Hollywood and explored previously taboo subjects such as sexuality and drug usage.

Audiences were lined up around the block for [Coffy] because they wanted to see Black people on screen who won for a change.

In Pelecanos’ second selected film—Jack Hill’s 1973 movie “Coffy”—the titular main character, played by Pam Grier, sets out on a quest for revenge against the drug dealers who tore apart her family through heroin addiction. The film rose in popularity through its star— Grier was one of the only Black actresses starring in action films at the time.

As Coffy, she displayed triumph and autonomy in an industry that defined women by their male costars. “Audiences were lined up around the block for [Coffy] because they wanted to see Black people on screen who won for a change,” Pelecanos recalls.

Seeing flicks like “Coffy” inspired Pelecanos to consider a career in film, but a University of Maryland professor convinced him

to pursue writing instead. “I have to give props to a teacher I had. They turned me on to books; [before], I was like a movie freak,” he says.

Once he began writing, Pelecanos decided he would focus on the people he saw in the spaces around him—those in low-income neighborhoods experiencing the most crime first-hand—who are often left out of the American crime novel and film canon.

“My books are all on the other side of town. They’re northeast and southeast and east of 16th Street. They’re social crime novels about what happens in neighborhoods where people don’t have opportunities and they don’t get the education they need,” he explains.

Pelecanos’ event at AFI spotlights films that feature characters similar to those in his books. Most of the films, like “Mr. Majestyk” (1974), a film about migrant workers on a melon farm, and “Car Wash” (1976), a film about employees at a car wash, highlight the struggles of those often left out of mass American media. They feature characters employed at day jobs on the big screen as the stars of their own lives

“That’s what… sets these films apart. ‘Mr. Majestyk’… on the surface [is] just an action movie set in the world of the migrant farmworkers and melon pickers, [but] there were no studios… making movies about migrant workers [back then],” Pelecanos says.

At the time of the movies’ release, Pelecanos was a young writer working similar day jobs to support himself. Like many other blue-collar workers at the time, he finally felt represented by a narrative in theaters. “These were populist films, and the characters in these films were made for the audiences that were watching them, which was not [common],” he says. “Most American films are about people who succeed, and people [went] to the movies to watch rich people.”

Pelecanos and the rest of the working class see their own triumphs and tribulations in the jokes, singing, and celebrations that the film’s characters share with each other. “There’s joy in going to work at the car wash every day with your friends, cutting on each other and having fun,” he says. “You

silverpatrons

find some joy in [the] camaraderie [with] the people that you meet and work with on the job. There’s something to that that’s usually not celebrated in films.”

the joy he found in “Car Wash” back to his regular job. “All over the country when that movie came out… people took the song ‘Car Wash,’ which was the title song about working in a car wash, and [they] changed the words to reflect wherever [they] were working. And it became the anthem for wherever you were working at the time,” he says.

With “George Pelecanos Presents,” Pelecanos hopes to highlight that these films’ lasting cultural impact stems not from accolades or nominations, but instead from the lasting impression they left on peo-

one of HBO’s best TV dramas ever, Pelecanos notes that the show struggled to stay afloat in its early days. “It wasn’t a hit when it was on the air. We had to go to HBO every year and pretty much [beg] them to renew us for the next year

because the ratings were abysmal,” tion, however, “The Wire” never lost relevance or timeliness. “And 20 years later, people are still talking about [‘The Wire’]. And that’s what you’re trying to do as an artist,” he says. “What you’re trying to do is have a legacy. These films

They’re not art films. They’re not prestige films… but they’ve withstood the test of time in their own way.

If you would like to support the paper, go to tinyurl.com/subtochips to subscribe to Silver Chips, be featured on the paper, and receive merchandise.

Diamond Mr. Eric W. and Dr. Jamie S. Padmore

Platinum

Gold

Silver Bronze

Kate Stewart - Susan Heavey

Chris Moriarity - Diane Kelleher - Jennie Guilfoyle and Mark Swartz - Pamela Sumner Coffey - Stenzler FamilySusan Euling - Tim Ernst and Grace Manubay - Timothy Ernst

Chenmuren Zhang - Emil Parker - Geoffrey Egnal - Joseph P Kowal - Katherine and Dan Hinckley - Katy and Bart Friedman - Marcela and Philip Bender - Mark Amaral - Mitch Warren & Joanna Slaney - Peter Colavito - Stefanie

Weiss - Stuart Guterman

Amy Cooke - Anne Pfitzer - Alison MacDonald - Cathy Feingold - Cathy Henderson - Claudia Deane - Corinne

Nash Sauri - Elizabeth Keyes - Gary Anderson - Gary MacDonald - Hans Riemer - Jason & Jamie Fasteau - Jorge Munoz - Katherine & Dan Hinckley - Kathy Cole - Kurt and Dot Kasik - Lorig Charkoudian - Maria Vélez -

Mckinley Jovanovic - Mica Bevington - Michael Newman - Nicholas Jovanovic - Nina Schwartz - Pamela Winston - Reemberto Rodriguez - Rex Robison - Ron and Connie Hanson - Sarah Hanson - Tami Spire - The Holmquist

Family - Marina Deane-Gonzalez

GEORGE PELECANOS

PHOTO BY MAIA TURPEN

DOWNTOWN SILVER SPRING AFI George Pelecanos introduces “Coffy,” one of the films he is showcasing at the AFI in Silver Spring, as a harbinger of change in 1970s Hollywood.

GEORGE PELECANOS

Photos by Margot Buehler and Jonathan Cumblidge

Sankofa returns to the stage Sankofa regresa al escenario

By Rosie Orzulak and Sophie Yohannan Opinions Editor & Staff Writer

Following two years of virtual productions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Blair students are exhilarated to finally return to performing Sankofa in person. Sankofa is an annual event that celebrates and pays homage to Black culture during Black History Month at Blair. The production is a devised theater piece with poems, songs, and dances dispersed between two original scenes written by students.

“Sankofa is a type of bird [that] look[s] back while flying forward. It’s derived from a traditional Ghanaian language, symbolizing the importance of one looking back through their past culture and history in order to progress forward together as a people,” student writer and Sankofa co-director Sephora Depenyou explains. “It teaches the Black community [that] knowing our history is crucial to unlocking the depths of our power.”

The tradition of Sankofa is crucial to Blair’s inclusive culture and holds sentimental value for many students. “A lot of the time within school and the curriculum, we learn more about the hardships of African American history, which is important,” freshman singer and dancer Abby Mizan says. “But… getting the chance to showcase the beauty of African American culture is super significant. I’m glad that Blair has been doing this because it’s important, especially to the community within the school.”

Many cast members joined Sankofa because of the unique way it allows them to connect with and appreciate their own cultural heritage. “[Sankofa] really resonated with me because there are not a lot of events that are representative of me and my identity and the identity of most of the students here at Blair,” Mizan explains.

In 2021 and 2022, Sankofa lost its conventional live format and was instead posted as a series of videos for students to watch on YouTube. The videos consisted of poems, dances, and songs that are prominent to African and African American culture, however the notable acting portion was cut. This year, students have returned to the traditional production, with the performances centered around the theme of unity.

Sankofa themes are unanimously decided by the collection of script writers and student directors. “Sankofa is centered around the African American diaspora. Each year, we pick a theme that encapsulates that in whichever way we want to… This year we wanted it to be uniting. So we picked our theme to be unity within the community,” Depenyou explains.

It teaches the Black community [that] knowing our history is crucial to unlocking the depths of our power.

“[Now,] it’s almost like we’re starting over, because only a handful of seniors had ever done it on the stage. So it was kind of a brand new, another revival yet again.”

Depenyou, along with other co-writers and directors, had an idea of what the process was supposed to look like by observing the Sankofa leadership from previous years.

“I had a lot of fun doing it last year. It definitely helped me see more of [a backstage view], on how Sankofa is made,” she says.

“[My friend] was one of the directors last year and I got to see her go through making the script when she had to, so it wasn’t as hard when I had to now come up with a script.”

The transition back to an in-person production this year, however,

Por Estefany Benitez Gonzalez y Zoë Kaiser Editora-en-Jefe y Escritora

El 16 de febrero se abrieron las puertas del auditorio de Blair y así comenzó Sankofa. Sankofa es una fundación que existe en todas partes del mundo. Es un enfoque en la experiencia afro-diversa para promover educación a través de arte, teatro, poemas y varios medios de comunicación. “Debes volver atrás para recuperar lo que se ha perdido para seguir adelante”, está escrito en el centro del sitio web de Sankofa. Este es el mensaje central del movimiento, una enfatización en la historia del pasado acompañada con un análisis sobre el efecto en nuestra sociedad hoy en día.

En Blair, el mensaje de Sankofa se

tiempo. Sephora Depenyou es una estudiante en Blair que está en el doceavo grado y que participa en el programa de Sankofa. Este año, ella es una escritora de la obra, actriz y finalmente, también participa como poeta. Depenyou comenta sobre la importancia de Sankofa en Blair, “creo que es realmente importante…Blair tiene una comunidad tan amplia y Sankofa está destacando una de las comunidades más grandes que tenemos en Blair. Es el momento en el que todos nos reunimos, no solo para disfrutar este mes (el mes de la cultura afroamericana) y celebrarnos a nosotros mismos, sino también trabajar en algo que nos importa. Así que todos estamos trabajando para lograr esto maravilloso que todos estamos haciendo juntos”.

Skye Sibrian, una estudiante del doceavo que tiene un rol importante de ser una de las coreógrafas en Sankofa, comenta que, “El liderazgo es diferente. Estamos teniendo más carreras de estudiantes. También hemos cambiado la forma en que tiene el guión. Este guión ha cambiado la estructura del espectáculo. También es difícil, porque estamos construyendo desde cero porque no hemos hecho este espectáculo en tres años”. Sephora dice que está muy “orgullosa de todos en Sankofa. Y los maestros, los estudiantes lo están haciendo realmente increíble. Y creo que Blair es el tipo de escuela en la que siempre nos reunimos y siempre podemos hacer algo”.

SEPHORA DEPENYOU

Last year’s production was intended to be in person, but preparations were halted as a result of the COVID-19 Omicron variant. “Last year, we started in person, and we were having practices in person. And then the plug got pulled, and we went online, some kind of halfway through,” Robert Gibb, a European History teacher and Sankofa scriptwriting overseer, explains.

still ignites general anxiety for some. “I’m a little bit nervous because I haven’t been on a stage live in front of people in a really long time,” Depenyou, a senior, admits.

However, the nerves don’t take away from the production. “It’s also really rewarding. I just know that I’m going to be so happy when I actually get on stage and when it happens. So I’m nervous, but I’m excited and hopeful,” Depenyou says.

Throughout the process of planning, practicing, and finally performing the show, Sankofa cast members lived the production’s theme of togetherness by fostering their own tight-knit community. “Sankofa is supposed to bring everyone together and celebrate unity... And whenever we greet each other, [or] approach each other, it’s always with respect. And I think that creates a sense of family, which stays true to [the] Sankofa message,” Mizan explains.

And while Sankofa is a celebration of Black history and culture, student performers emphasize that everyone, no matter their background, is welcome and encouraged to attend the performance. “Although [Sankofa] tells a story of African American culture, it’s really to promote unity,” Mizan says. “Having more people come to Sankofa just helps them better understand the beauty and the struggle and everything in between about African and African American history and culture.”

COURTESY OF ROBERTGIBB

traduce en una producción impactante y anual. Este año, el programa fue presentado durante tres días. “Sankofa es algo realmente importante dentro de la comunidad. Y muchos de los miembros de la comunidad salen (para verlo)”, dice el Sr. Overton, un entrenador vocal para Sankofa, “Creo que le da voz a muchos estudiantes que a veces pueden sentirse marginados”. Hay alrededor de veinticinco estudiantes participando en el elenco.

Ach’sah Gubena, un poeta que está participando en la producción, añade que “Creo que para mí es como una salida. Puede expresarse, escuchar a otras personas y las luchas por las que han pasado, me ayudó a darme cuenta de que los problemas que tengo no son solamente míos”, ella explica “sino que es más un problema compartido, sintiendo la experiencia compartida”.

Uno de los maestros que está ayudando a los estudiantes desde el comienzo, Sr. Gibb, dice que “Así que creo que nuestro mensaje es que tenemos que hacerlo juntos. Si no trabajamos juntos, no pasará nada. Así que creo que la comunidad Sankofa, nuevamente, es gente que siguió luchando después de Martin Luther King, la gente siguió adelante, y ahora depende de ti”.

Este programa involucra estudiantes, maestros, artistas y cantantes cuyos poemas o canciones han estado vivas por mucho

Este evento tuvo lugar en un lapso de tres días: El 16,17 y 18 de febrero de 2023. Las entradas tenían un precio de 8 dólares y el dinero era recogido por el departamento de teatro. La noche se destacó con la presencia de Isatu Borbor y Skye Sibrian, quienes dieron una bienvenida a la audiencia. El evento tuvo una duración de aproximadamente 2 horas, con un entreacto de 25 minutos. El programa se basaba en un acto de algunos estudiantes en una universidad de categoría Escuelas y Universidades históricamente negras (HBCU por sus siglas en inglés) que luchaban para tener una mejor vida y querían recibir ayuda financiera de parte de la administración en la universidad. A medida que el acto se desarrolla, los estudiantes protestan contra la administración por la injusticia creada por la falta de ayuda financiera y las condiciones de las viviendas. Como consecuencia de esto, la policía causa que una protesta pacífica se convierta en una tragedia, haciendo que una estudiante ingrese en el hospital en coma.

Creo que le da voz a muchos estudiantes que a veces pueden sentirse marginados.

En el acto había poemas presentados por otros estudiantes y también cantos solistas y en coro. Skye Sibrian responde lo que espera con el progreso de Sankofa, “Espero una gran multitud, porque esa es la mejor parte de Sankofa. Siempre hay una multitud realmente grande, y hay un montón de gente divertida en la audiencia, y eso nos ayuda con nuestra energía”.

Eso es lo que sucedió Eji Conger, un estudiante de décimo grado en Blair que asistió al evento y que habla animadamente sobre Sankofa, “solo ser negro, en general, es como si [el elenco] dijo cosas que realmente resonaron conmigo en lo más profundo de mi ser”.

Mark’s Kitchen to close after 32 years of service

By Dyan Nguyen and Cate Sauri Staff Writers

Mark’s Kitchen is not known as a fancy restaurant, nor is it lauded for exquisite dishes or fine dining. To some, it may even seem strange to combine a diner-like menu with Korean food. But when the Takoma Park staple announced in late January that it was closing its doors after 32 years of service, the community was heartbroken.

Owner Mark Choe immigrated from South Korea in 1985 and opened his Takoma Park restaurant in December 1990, right after graduating from an English language school. He decided to open his restaurant in Takoma Park after falling in love with the area. “I knew this neighborhood was a very good neighborhood, [a] good community,” Choe says.

Choe also ran two other businesses, a coffee shop and a grocery store, in Takoma Park over the years, though they have since closed and been replaced with other local icons such as Cielo Rojo.

Now, Choe says it is time for

him to retire and spend more time with his family, something that proved difficult while operating the restaurant. “I’m very old and tired. I have to [make] time for my family,” Choe says. “I didn’t have time with them [in the past] because I was [working] seven days [a week], 12 hours everyday.”

His restaurant features a unique fusion of Korean and American cuisine, offering menu items ranging from Korean short ribs to the avocado turkey burger that match Takoma Park’s diversity. “I really enjoyed exploring different flavors,” Boris Savitskiy, local food blogger and creator of Nom Nom Boris, says. “It’s one of those ways that… different cultures can get along and be together and… contribute to each other and make everything great. I think food is one of those things that’s a great unifier.”

Before making his debut in the culinary world, Choe spent countless hours picking what to put on his menu. “I selected a lot of different things, mostly [from the] internet. I [worked] at 4 [to] 5 in the morning. I was thirty years old, [so at]... that time I [had] the energy,” Choe says.

Over the course of three decades, Mark’s Kitchen has built itself into a pillar of the Takoma Park community. “[Mark’s Kitchen is] significant because it’s been around for a long time and there’s been a lot of businesses that have come through Takoma Park, but it’s lasted probably one of the longest out of all of them,” junior Ayli Stoebenau says.

Its casual and cozy ambiance has made the establishment a great place for a quick bite, and many have enjoyed going to Mark’s with friends and family. “Mark’s Kitchen has always been a staple of Ta-

koma Park,” senior Aiden Markle says. “It’s always just been… a gathering place for [the community].”

Savitskiy has been ordering his favorite sour cream pancakes from Mark’s for years. For him, the spot offers not only his own favorite mouthwatering food, but also something to suit anyone else’s taste. “[It is] one of those places where you can pretty much get any type of dish that you may want, like if you’re vegetarian or vegan, or [if you] eat meat,” he says.

Since Choe announced his retirement, community members have expressed their admiration for the restaurant and their sorrows over its upcoming closure, with many stopping by one last time to show their appreciation and say farewell. The business could not keep up with the demand this created due to staff and ingredient shortages. “Everybody I know stopped by [to say] hello and goodbye. [There were so many customers] that we had to close, we [couldn’t] control [it]. No food, no staff, but a million customers waiting,” Choe says.

According to Choe, four different parties are still discussing with his landlord to assume the lease for Mark’s Kitchen, and two of them are keen to maintain the restaurant

as it is. Mark’s Kitchen was originally scheduled to close at the end of January; however, Choe decided to keep the restaurant open until it sells. “Sorry for the confusion. Mark’s Kitchen will remain open until the business is sold,” a piece of paper attached to the restau-

[Fusion food is] one of those ways that… different cultures can get along and be together and… contribute to each other and make everything great.

rant’s front door reads. Mark is confident that his establishment will continue to be a restaurant and plans to hand over the keys by the end of February.

Longtime customers remain hopeful that the restaurant’s new owners will carry on Mark’s mission to bring casual and comforting food to all who walk through his doors. “I’m crossing my fingers… that the place will stay open, maybe with a different owner [so] we’ll still be able to go there,” Savitskiy says.

BORIS SAVITSKIY

PHOTOS BY DYLAN WARREN

I’m very old and tired. I have to [make] time for my family... I didn’t have time with them [in the past] because I was [working] seven days [a week], 12 hours everyday.

MARK CHOE

MARK’S KITCHEN Owner Mark Choe stands in front of his restaurant, a business that has been serving the Takoma Park community and beyond for the past 32 years.

By Eliana Finberg Culture Editor

Sometimes referred to as “beach reads” or “guilty pleasure books,” romance novels often get passed off as not “real” literature. The main characters fall in love, there’s lots of kissing, and the ending is always happy. But romance novels are the highest-selling genre of book, so why do they get so much hate? Probably because of their reader demographics: over 80 percent of romance novel readers are women.

Marketed as books “by women, for women,” romance novels have been considered “less than” other predominantly male-dominated genres for centuries. Even “Pride and Prejudice,” which was voted America’s Favorite Book in a 2022 survey with over 76,000 participants, is still described as “chick lit.” Although the literary classic is analyzed by scholars and taught in English classes across the country, many of its one-star reviews say the same thing: the book was boring and romantic, and “maybe this is more of a book for women.”

While romance novels naturally include romance-centered plots, they can also be vessels for talking about more difficult or traditionally taboo subjects. For instance, “Icebreaker” by Hannah Grace delves into the role of eating disorders, toxic friendships, and therapy in the lives of athletes. While such topics may seem heavy for any writer to tackle, discussing them against the backdrop of a figure skater who falls in love with her hockey counterpart makes them seem normal.

Romance novels have been considered “less than” other predominantly male-dominated genres for centuries.

Because of the contemporary nature and modern realistic setting of many romance novels, authors like Grace don’t need to call attention to the fact that they’re discussing such topics—they can just incorporate them, leading to a seamlessness you don’t often get from the average realistic fiction

A welcoming coven

from WITCHES page A1

Bastet, who lives through symbols of beetles and cats. “Gaia reaching out to me can look like trees falling over in my yard or… cats and beetles for Bastet,” Heuchuck says.

Many Wiccans experience a deep connection to nature during their youth, showing signs of Wiccan spiritualism called imitations. Some notice these patterns as children, while others tune into their callings as adults.

ELIZA COOKE

downer. Readers shouldn’t have to pick up a heavy book just to read about issues that are starting to become normalized in society— romance presents new and diverse narratives in a palatable way, helping fold discussions about them into everyday life.

Romance presents new and diverse narratives in a palatable way, helping fold discussions about them into everyday life.

Other well-done romances include “Beach Read” by Emily Henry and “The Love Hypothesis” by Ali Hazelwood. “Beach Read” as a romance novel may seem a bit ironic, but the book goes in-depth about dealing with loss and betrayal. January, the main character, moves into her father’s second house after his passing, and tries to come to terms with his death while meeting his mistress. Henry’s portrayal of grief accurately reflects the complex nature of the subject, leaving readers with a sense of understanding in addition to the happy ending.

Hazelwood is a neuroscientist who writes romance novels about women in STEM fields. “The Love Hypothesis” follows Olive, a biology Ph.D. candidate, as she navigates the world of academia. Throughout the book, she is constantly turned down for being a woman and only receives promotions and opportunities because of her beauty and looks. While Hazelwood’s coverage of the workplace harassment women in STEM face is on the nose, she also brings awareness to men standing up for women—a fact that should continue to be talked about.

For the literary world’s most popular and rapidly growing genre, romance should be seen as a powerful medium for depicting serious topics and not just as a guilty pleasure. Whether read on the beach or in a scientific laboratory, romance novels are for everyone.

Jonathan White, 53, who realized he was Wiccan in his late 20s, also found himself drawn to nature as a child. He often collected and communicated with parts of the natural world, and, like Heuchuck, turned those habits into a fascination with the gods and goddesses he now believes are present in every leaf and rock around him.

“[Kids who show] early signs [of being] Wiccan have a really intense attachment to nature, talk a lot to plants and animals, collect rocks and sticks, or often have an early interest in tarot cards or in occult things” White says. “All grown up though, they discover that in fact… there’s meaning to be had [in] collecting rocks and wandering in the woods and looking at tarot cards.”

Wicca, although sometimes described as a “new religious movement,” draws from ancient pagan traditions, such as the polytheistic practice of altar worship. For Heuchuck and White, what started with foraging sacred symbols evolved into a practice of worshiping gods and goddesses through altars, dream interpretation, candle lighting, and journaling.

Wiccans also observe annual holidays that follow the “Wheel of The Year,” a calendar of each year’s main solar events for modern-day witches. This calendar includes Yule, a Germanic holiday representing hope that coincides with the winter solstice, and Imbolc, a Celtic celebration of empowerment set between the winter solstice and spring equinox, among eight others sourced

from ancient European pagan cultures.

This year, some Wiccans celebrated Imbolc on Zoom. The online conference platform allowed people from all over the world to join each other virtually for rituals that were typically held in person prior to the pandemic. On Feb. 5, the Stone Circle Tradition of Wicca, a local coven of witches and pagans, hosted an online gather -

goddess’ manifestations. A participant may seek the power of voice from the poet, power to repair or create from the blacksmith, or the power to help those who are suffering from the healer, but must also explain how they will use Brigid’s power to help others.

ing for Imbolc along- side its monthly full moon ceremonies.

The ceremony begins with 70 participants grounding and centering themselves to prepare for the ritual by relaxing and becoming open to the next experience. They then pay respects to, or “reverence,” the four compass directions and honor their ancestors and descendants. Finally, they call upon the divine to join them for the ritual.

Participants raise their hand via chat box to indicate that they would like to speak to one of the Irish goddess Brigid’s three representatives. Dressed in veils, cloaks, and broaches and framed by their Zoom boxes, the representatives then arrive at the ceremony. The goddess is present at the meeting through these three emissaries, each of whom represents a physical form of one of the goddess’ three roles: the healer, the blacksmith, and the poet.

As Imbolc is a time for empowerment, participants who raise their hand are invited to request the power of one or more of the

One participant called upon the blacksmith to enable them as they build shelters for housing-insecure transgender people—a request that illustrates the Wiccan community’s celebration and love of differences that make everyone human or witch.Inclusion is a core value of Stone Circle Wicca, a D.C.-based Wiccan coven, as their membership is comprised primarily of women and members of the queer community.

“We know from the social science research that about 70 percent of Wiccans are women and almost 50 percent are LGBTQ+. In our tradition, the Stone Circle tradition, it’s like 85 percent LGBT,” White says. “One of the things that brings many people to Wicca is… they want to be part of a religious community, but they find many religious communities are sexist and homophobic or authoritarian.”

17-year-old Grace Urban was drawn to Wicca after witnessing transphobia in a religious group she was formally active in. “[The group] wanted to exclude [transgender women] because they said that biology overrides [gender identity]... Neither [my mom nor I] could be okay with being somewhere that said that… so we left,” Urban says.

After joining Stone Circle Wicca, Urban reconnected with her spirituality in an environment that fostered acceptance regardless of sexual orientation and background.

Wiccans believe that witches have always been witches, just as people in the LGBTQ community have always been part of the LGTBQ community. Noticing the whispering of the wind, the flickering of candles, and the meaning behind the recurring beetles and black cats shows Wiccans who they are. Even after years of suppression, they can return to Wicca and join a coven like Stone Circle Wicca, which will always welcome them with open arms.

“We call that ‘homecoming.’

It really parallels coming out as an LGBTQ+ person... so we tend to think that Wiccans aren’t made, they’re born.”

ELIZA COOKE

ABJINI CHATTOPADHYAY

By Sedise Tiruneh Culture Columnist

For many Black Americans, the familiar and inviting aroma of onions, peppers, and various other seasonings means home, family, and history. From collard greens to chitlins, the cuisine of soul food has become inextricable from Black culture in America, symbolizing the tenacity of a culture in the face of oppression.

Emerging from antebellum America, soul food was the product of cultural fusion: a unique and bittersweet blend of the African diaspora flavors, the indigenous population’s agricultural influence, and the financial destitution enslaved populations were forced to live under in colonial America. As this hybrid cuisine de-

COURTESY OF KATALINA LI

social and economic shifts led to the Great Migration of Black Americans from the south, which once again put diverse food cultures across the land on a collision course. The emergence of a new Black identity precipitated the cultivation of a contemporary cuisine: soul food.

While the iteration of soul food that we enjoy today still carries that history, it has evolved

Woodlands Vegan Bistro, NuVegan founder and CEO Vernon Woodland expanded the chain’s reach by opening a food truck in 2013 and a College Park location in 2015. From there, the restaurant exploded in popularity as its vegan and gluten-free accommodations exposed a broader audience to the wonders of soul food.

Across its unique and expansive menu, one of NuVegan’s most popular entrees is the Vegan Fried Chick’n. This plant-based take on fried chicken is built off of a soy protein base but retains the crispy breading and warm seasoning blend of paprika, garlic, and chili powder characteristic to the classic dish.

The restaurant also offers a wide variety of side dishes that covers a broad range of flavors and textures. One of them is Caribbean Chick Peas, a flavorful melange of coconut, ginger, thyme, and curry powder. Pairing beautifully with this satisfyingly savory side is the Garlic Kale—a distinct, smoky dish reminiscent of collard greens, this menu item champions the spot of the vegetable staple in a classic soul food platter.

While soul food is a direct product of the Black American experience, the arrival of a contemporary African diaspora in recent decades has

ing identity of Black America while simultaneously paying respect to its storied history and tradition.

Throughout the menu, patrons can find creative options that exemplify this multicultural experimentation. One of the main dishes offered is Doro’s

Cumin Qibe Cornbread. What makes the dish so special is the star ingredient, qibe—an Ethiopian clarified butter spiced with cardamom, fenugreek, coriander, and more. Its warm and earthy flavors beautifully complement the nutty and tart notes of the black cumin.

Another favorite is the Spiced Mac & Cheese, which incorporates the spicy punch of doro wot, a flavorful chicken-based stew. Cutting through the spice and tang is a generous sprinkle of breadcrumb-style injera, a slightly sour Ethiopian flatbread. These flavors and textures skillfully accompany the traditional comfort food, elevating it into a new soul food staple.

take on the classic fried chicken. The Fried Doro Plate presents patrons with chicken marinated in berbere and other aromatic Ethiopian spices. Alternatively, the Vegan Tender Plate caters to a wider variety of diets by substituting chicken with spiced jackfruit and pea protein, delivering an equally satisfying culinary experience to a broad range of consumers.

Doro’s dedication to Ethiopian piquancy shines through in its options for spice levels, starting with “naked,” or mild, and eventually ascending to “berbere” and “mit mita,” harkening to the fiery

Traversing generations and cultures, soul food serves as a vessel for telling stories—stories of oppression and migration, as well as those of unwavering spirit and perseverance. As Black History Month comes to an end, we are reminded of the importance of celebrating the cultural richness of this community. The soul food cuisine represents surand pride and bears great significance to the African diaspora, old and new, reflecting America’s evolving Black culture and identity through

Chips Clips

Promising Plans

1 Dew and Vera prefer quieter spaces.

Five friends hang out at a flower shop before their respective afternoon dates, one of which will be at the annual carnival! Using the following information, can you determine whose partner is who, as well as what bouquet they purchased and where they will go?

2 Elm enjoys arcades, though there are none nearby.

3 Izzy favors color assortments.

4 Kelsa already visited the local playground with their partner last week.

5 Lai fancies blue hyacinths.

6 Min loves pink carnations and pop concerts.

7 Ness’s partner has an evergrowing vase of zinnias.

8 Sing buys their partner white camellias.

9 Tae will meet their partner in the food court.

10 The partner who will receive purple violets will visit the art museum.

Cryptic

Crosswords

Scan the QR code to learn what a cryptic crossword is and tips and tricks for solving them.

ACROSS

1 Satan lived backwards

4 Crooked tiara displayed in heart chambers

5 Undead beer hosts Roman four

DOWN

1 Outside drastic trauma show

2 Like worms caught in whatever misery

3 Lose first clean cut to take time off

Scan the QR codes to see the solutions to the Promising Plans, Sudoku, and Cryptic Crosswords puzzles. Promising Plans Sudoku Cryptic Crosswords

Sudoku

In each column, each of the digits 1–9 appear once. In each row, each of the digits 1–9 appear once. In each bolded 3-by-3 box, each of the digits 1–9 appear once.

ELINA LEE

ACROSS

1 Disorder half of a dance operating system

4 Sink down to circular wreath

5 In tiramisu garnished with sweetener

DOWN

1 Short crew steerer heard chickens

2 Surrounded by a messy mango

3 Radar glide around in without me

Contact Puzzle Editor Elina Lee at puzzleelina@gmail.com with the subject “Chips Clips March” with questions, comments, concerns, or any other feedback.

ELINA LEE

COURTESY OF JAY CHAO

ELINA LEE

ELINA LEE ELIZA COOKE

Djokovic descends on the net and drops it short. Federer, who started behind the baseline, sprints to get the ball, slides to reach it, and tries to send it past Djokovic. But Djokovic gets to the ball in time and lobs it over Federer’s head!

Everyone assumes it’s over. The crowd relaxes, and Djokovic eases his stance. Federer, though, turns and bolts to get the ball. He doesn’t have the time to hit it normally, so he does a tweener—hitting the ball between his legs with his back to his opponent. The ball goes low above the net and far to Djokovic’s right. It’s an impossible shot made at the last minute.

The crowd roars in applause. Federer has won the point, and will go on to win the match a minute later. It’s a glorious victory. The perfect one for Mr. can’t-do-a-serve-tosave-his-life to recreate.

The 2:30 p.m. bell rang and I made my way to Blair’s tennis courts. It was my first attempt at imitating the legendary shot. I, playing the role of Federer, stood a few feet behind the baseline, waiting for Djokovic—my brother—to serve. He sent it down the inside.

I returned it with grace. He gave it to my backhand. I sent it right back into his service box. He dropped it short. I sprinted, slid, and sent it back. He lobbed it over my head

By Mandy Guo and Zoë Kaiser Staff Writers

Strength, responsibility, perseverance, sacrifice, and commitment. These are all traits taught through intensive combat sports such as wrestling. Young wrestlers readily benefit from the intense training and welcoming community that the sport fosters. However, wrestling is a male-dominated space, making it inaccessible to many girls.

According to senior wrestler

Chloe Farber, Blair’s wrestling community and coaches have nurtured a safe environment for female wrestlers. “The coaching staff has done a really good job of making [the team] a safer place, and they are continuing to do so,” she explains. Farber also appreciates being able to support other girls on the team. “It’s really fun for me to be able to help younger girls figure out how strength works and how to harness power. [Wrestling is] technical, strategic, and the mindset is very intense.”

For Blair wrestling coach Timothy Grover, the wrestling team’s co-ed nature fosters a uniquely positive and supportive environment.

“By and large, I think having a coed team has actually been wonderful overall… I think the guys tend to be very supportive of the girls… and [the girls are] also super supportive of the guys,” he explains. “I think [the dynamic between the boys and girls has] made our team a little more close-knit, and it’s been a little more fun.”

Despite this, it can still be hard for girls to take the first step and join wrestling. “Girls are just more

and in a glorious triumph I sent the tweener past him and in!

Just kidding!!! While practicing tweeners beforehand I hit myself in the crotch twice, and then an errant ball kicked up dirt into my eye. It was a disaster.

It may come as a surprise, but professional tennis is really hard! After the crotch and eye damage, I was pretty down in the dumps. I practiced a few tweeners the next day, but the challenge just seemed like a waste of my time. Tennis is truly a mental sport. And I just wasn’t in the right mindset anymore.

“I could be using this to actually

improve,” I thought. “Oh. That’s a good idea.”

Feb. 19—Okay. Let’s try this again: Blair’s tennis tryouts start in just over a week. Last year, I barely missed a varsity starting spot, and I can’t let that happen again, so I’ll need to train. What can I do to compete with Blair’s best? Learn to play like the intermediates, of course! For this edition of “Participation Trophy,” I’m going to hit serves repeatedly to make sure I don’t totally suck at tryouts.

I’ll start with doing a diagnostic of my serving ability by hitting 25 serves and counting how many I get into the service box. I’ll do half on the deuce side, half on the ad side. Half facing the sun, half away from the sun. Then, I’ll do 500 serves over a couple of days to get as much practice as possible. Afterward, I’ll do another 25 serves and see how much I’ve improved. Let’s get started.

Day one: out, in, out. Out, out, out. Out, out, in. In, in, out. In, in, in. Out, in, in. Out, out, out. Out, out, out. In. Did you get all that? 10 in, 15 out. If those were points, I would have lost around 41 percent of them from double faults alone. That’s not varsity quality. It’s time to practice.

Serves are perhaps the most exacting and essential shot in tennis.

No other shot requires the same level of precision and energy as the serve does. To not only get the ball from a static position to an active one, but also aim it in a single quarter of the opponent’s court, is particularly challenging. For a short guy like me, who will likely have less powerful serves than my opponents, the task is all the more critical to master.

But this challenge, like my former two, isn’t about quality at all. I just needed to hit a bunch of serves. As the sun retreated—too intimidated by my fiery determination to watch, no doubt—I hit serve after serve after serve after serve.

Diminishing returns quickly became apparent, though. Serving is all about form, and the longer I went on, the less energy and attention I could give each shot. My form wavered, and I only saw marginal improvement. But potential was swelling. I had hit 250 serves without much physical evidence to show for it, but there was hope.

The next day was much better. It was the perfect temperature outside and I felt amazing. The lessons I failed to implement yesterday started to come together. I was sending most of my serves too

Blair girls take to the mat

hesitant to get into the male dominated sport… because it is intimidating,” sophomore wrestler Linh Hoang says. As such, encouragement from female wrestlers already on the team is often what draws new members in. “The girls that were on the team last year [were] super welcoming. They [said] ‘You should totally [join the team],’ so I was encouraged,” Hoang shares.

Junior McKinley Jovanovic had a similar experience getting involved in wrestling. After a male wrestler encouraged her to join the team, Jovanovic was initially hesitant. “I was [thinking], ‘No way, I’m not doing that. That doesn’t seem like something for me.’ I just kept thinking about it... so I tried it, and I really loved it,” she says.

to support and train them. “The coaching staff is going to have to continue evolving and continue learning how to teach girls to wres tle and what works for them and what doesn’t if they truly value them as a part of the team, which I think the coaching staff at Blair does,” Farber explains.

Indeed, Grover has adjusted to teach different techniques to girls that are more suited for their anat omy and strengths. “A move that I teach to boys to finish a takedown would be to use their upper body to balance themselves, slide their hips underneath them, and then stand up to drive through their op ponent. Girls just don’t really have that power to do that, especially when they’re wrestling against boys, so we’ve had different finishes for them in those types of situations that we’ve gone over,” he explains.

Such changes will help Blair better fulfill the mission of Title IX, a law prohibiting discrimination based on sex in federally-funded education programs that marked its 50th anniversary in 2022. “We’ve been trying to make sure that people aren’t denied opportunities based on sex,” Department of Justice Chief of Civil Rights Education Shaheena Simons says.

far instead of too short (which is, all things considered, a really good problem to have). By serve number 500, I felt so overjoyed I even took a couple more hits for fun. Then, I mentally prepared for the most important 25 serves of my preseason.

In. In. In. In. Out. In. Out. In. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. In. In. In. Out. 15 in. 10 out. That improvement in and of itself isn’t groundbreaking. Sure, I got five more serves in and five fewer serves out, but that isn’t a huge deal. But there were two really important developments. Firstly, my serves got a lot faster and more consistent. They weren’t all over the court. Around half of the “outs” were narrow misses.

Secondly, the distribution of the “ins” and “outs” was quite different. In my original attempt, I had seven double faults (hitting the ball out twice in a row). This time, I had two. Before, I would have lost approximately 41 percent of my points to double faults. Here, I would have only lost around six percent.

That’s a fantastic improvement, but I still have a whole week before tryouts start. Another 500 wouldn’t hurt.

Currently, there are seven girls on the wrestling team, and Jovanovic thinks that the number will only rise in the coming years. “I think it’s growing to the point where there will be separate girls and guys teams for wrestling, which I think is really great,” she says.

As more girls get involved in wrestling, the team must adjust

To ensure all athletes can access these opportunities, the Department of Justice and court system hold schools accountable for fairly distributing resources, such as gym equipment and advertising for sporting events. “Courts look at [if] there is equality of opportunity at a broader level, and so there are these different tests that the courts apply to try to figure out whether that’s true or not,” she explains.

onships on Feb. 18.

This season, female wrestlers at MCPS high schools were a step closer to such equality, as the county recently created an all-girls county wrestling tournament to match the longstanding boys’ tournament, giving girls the opportunity to wrestle with their peers in the school district and fight for their own title.

“We’ve always had the guys’ county tournament… It’s been going for [maybe] over 50 years. [Now] they’re adding the girls to that component, so girls will wrestle just each other, and there’ll be a girls county champion in each weight [category],” Grover explains.

Even though the girls on Blair’s team now have their own county tournament and thus train to win against other girls, Grover makes an effort to not treat them differently when it comes to rigor, holding

the same expectations for girls as he does for the boys on the team. He mentions what he has noticed for some other wrestling teams. “If a drill gets pretty hard… the other coach will [say], ‘Oh, you girls can sit this one out if you want to,’” Grover says. Grover doesn’t make the same exceptions, expecting the girls on the team to do the same drills as the boys, even if they’re difficult. “[We] all are doing [our] drill[s] together,” he says.

Practices like this exemplify the culture of inclusion at Blair wrestling. “When you’re transforming a space to be more inclusive of girls, more safe for girls, it’s not just ‘oh she’s a part of the team so we’re done now,’” Farber says. “It’s ‘girls are allowed to wrestle, [but] are they safe and protected by people on the team?’”

PHOTOS BY JONATHAN CUMBLIDGE

I was [thinking], ‘No way, I’m not doing that. That doesn’t seem like something for me.’ I just kept thinking about it... so I tried it, and I really loved it.

MCKINLEY

By John Ernst and Nora Pierce Sports Editor & Staff Writer

Sports journalism is about more than reporting on scores and plays for Kevin Blackistone, a sports columnist for The Washington Post and a Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland. Blackistone focuses on the role that sports play in broader social and political issues and has covered such issues for a variety of newspapers since 1981. He is also a frequent contributor to ESPN’s sports debate show “Around the Horn,” which features some of the nation’s leading sports columnists. Blackistone sat down with Silver Chips to reflect on his career thus far and offer advice for aspiring sports journalists.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What about your sports journalism for The Washington Post is different from other focuses?

The only thing that’s different for me, and the way I think I’ve evolved in sports journalism, is because of my background in what people today would call social justice reporting. Most of the time when I write about sports, I’m writing about the intersection of sports, race, equality, and inequity far more than I am writing about the outcome of games or who wins championships.

How do you approach and develop those deeper stories with more background meaning?

Q&A with sports journalist Kevin Blackistone

I am currently writing a column about LeBron James because he’s about to set the new scoring record for the NBA. [However,] I’m not writing about LeBron James’ legacy as the greatest scorer in the histo ry of the NBA—I’m writing about LeBron’s legacy as an athlete who is very representative of this era. People are looking to athletes to stand up and speak out on critical issues in society. Before there was Colin Kaepernick and the women on the Minnesota Lynx team who stood up for Philando Castile’s murder in Minneapolis, there was LeBron James standing up for Trayvon Martin in Miami when he was murdered on the street by a vigilante. So that’s the kind of ap proach that I take to writing sports columns.

What do you think the role of journalists like yourself is in all of the sports protests and in athletes using their platform to talk about social issues?

Well, I think [the role of sports journalists] is to give publicity to [demonstrating athletes] if they are able to articulate the issue and are vested in talking about it. I’ll just give you an example: one of the most iconic photographs in the history of sports is from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. It’s with the U.S. sprinters John Carlos and Tommie Smith, standing on the podium for the 200-meter dash, accepting their medals, and they thrust their fists into the sky and bow their heads in protest against inequities in this country.

That story, when covered by Sports Illustrated at the time, was not on the cover—it was buried in-

side of the magazine. I think Sports Illustrated at the time editorially did a disservice to Tommie Smith and John Carlos. That was a front page story and they should have been front and center. Nowadays, after Colin Kaepernick in particular, I think that sports reporters are far more likely to ask questions of their purpose and explain it to the public, and not bury it inside of a magazine, or a website, or newspaper.

How do you teach your students at the University of Maryland to write the role of sports in social justice issues?

I teach two courses at the University of Maryland. I teach a skills course called Sports Reporting and Writing, which is just like it sounds. We talk about the tools and skills needed to report on sports and then we go out in the field and we cover actual events. I also tell students that if something pops up in the coverage of an event that they’re at, such as an athlete who refuses a medal or takes a knee, you have to find out why they are doing it and use your news judgment to determine whether or not it’s major news.

The other course I teach is called Sports, Protest, and Media, [which] is a critical thinking class to make people aware of the role that sports has historically played in amplifying issues of critical importance in society. I try to teach journalism students to be aware of how these things have unfolded in the past. I teach them to be aware of the fact that sports and politics have gone together since the first sports were played back in ancient Greece. I point out to them that the reason that Colin Kaepernick can protest with the national anthem… is because Woodrow Wilson, as President in the run up to World War I, demanded that the national anthem be played at sporting events. So had it not been for a political decision made by a politician, the national anthem wouldn’t even be in sports in the first place.

What’s the most interesting experience you’ve had or best story you’ve written in

your career?

One of my most treasured interviews that I’ve had was with Douglas Turner Ward. Douglas Turner Ward was a famous playwright in America and he wrote one of my favorite plays back in the 1960s, which is called “Day of Absence,” about a southern white town that wakes up one morning to find all the Black residents of the town have disappeared, and all of a sudden the white residents have to do all the work for themselves that the Black residents were doing for them. I was reading about the Milwaukee Bucks protest after the shooting of Jacob Blake during the bubble in the NBA and how they refused to play. They disappeared, and it forced everybody all of a sudden to focus on the critical issue of police brutality against Black men in this country.

So I called Douglas Turner Ward, and he gave me some great insight. What I didn’t know about Douglas Turner Ward, which I learned in interviewing him, was that he was a sports writer and sports editor for a short while at The Daily Worker, which was a socialist newspaper run out of New York City. Not only was he a sports editor there, but he followed as sports editor a guy by the name of Lester Rodney, who was the first sports editor for The Daily Worker and a famous one because he’s the first sports writer to start agitating Major League Baseball to desegregate back in the 1930s. That’s my most favored interview.

How

I think you have to understand the role of sports and society. It’s been used for a lot of different reasons. It’s not just used for entertainment. It’s used as a vehicle for nationalism, for commercialism, for patriotism, for politics. I think that’s something that people have to realize. I don’t really like to separate sports journalists from all other journalists, or all other journalists from sports journalists. We’re all journalists and we all have to have a feel for whatever it is we’re covering in terms of how it fits into a larger picture. So I think as long as

sports journalists understand that, we’re better off. I always say: the last thing sports journalism needs are more sports fans who just want to get into sports journalism so that they can be close to games. What sports journalism needs is more journalists who can really decipher what it is they’re watching and highlight why it’s so important.

What kind of advice do you have for sports journalists and journalists in general for feeling out a niche in whatever you’re writing about if it might not be something that you’re necessarily knowledgeable about?

If you’re a good journalist, you can cover anything. You still have to answer the key questions: who, what, when, where, why, how. You still have to decipher whatever it is you’re writing about [and] why it’s important. You have to figure out how to write a lede that’s going to invite readers to digest your story, and who is important to talk to to lend credence to whatever it is you’re writing about. I’ve never felt uncomfortable being tapped on the shoulder to cover anything. I’ve covered news, I’ve covered economics, and now I’ve covered sports. If an editor asked me to go cover an art exhibit, I know how to go about covering that art exhibit. I do my research, I figure out what the art exhibit is about, I figure out the important people to talk to to illuminate it, and I’m able to come back and craft a story. You can do it all if you’re a good journalist.

[Sports is] not just used for entertainment. It’s used as a vehicle for nationalism, for commercialism, for patriotism, for politics. I think that’s something that people have to realize.

can journalists in the future continue to make sports journalism more in-depth than just a box score and a recap?

KEVIN BLACKISTONE is a sports columnist for The Washington Post and a Professor of the Practice at the University of Maryland, as well as a frequent contributor to ESPN’s sports debate show “Around the Horn.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF KEVIN BLACKISTONE

ORIGINAL PHOTO BY JOHN DOMINIS FOR LIFE MAGAZINE, 1968 1968 OLYMPIC GAMES African-American Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise their fists on the podium during “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

KEVIN BLACKISTONE

A flag on the play Holding the NFL accountable for player safety

By Kyla Smith Staff Writer AN OPINION

When the Boston University Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center studied former NFL players’ brains, 345 of the 376—over 91 percent—had CTE, a “progressive degenerative disease of the brain found in people with a history of repetitive head impacts,” according to the university. Exposure to such physical trauma lowers life expectancy for a professional NFL player to just under 60 years—a deficit of over 17 years on the average American. For the U.S.’s sweetheart sport to put players at such risk while treating them as commodities is unacceptable.

American Football saw its rise to prominence in the late 60s, around the time of the first Super Bowl and the merger between the National Football League and the American Football League. Since then, the game has been considered “America’s sport” and has become rooted in traditions like Thanksgiving football and Super Bowl Sunday.

Although the game is many Americans’ choice of entertainment, fans are not the ones at risk of traumatic brain injuries, concussions, and life-threatening cardiac events. The adrenaline-pumping spectacle provides viewers with intense, action-packed entertainment at the cost of players’ lives—a tradeoff unbecoming of a modern-day professional sport. head blows, but rather the smaller, repetitive head impacts like those that football players experience throughout a game or season.” Her team’s research concluded that every year of playing tackle football increases the risk of developing CTE by 30%.

However, CTE is not the only health hazard football players face. According to data released by the NFL in February, the frequency of

regular season concussions rose by 18 percent in 2022 compared to 2021. It was also 14 percent higher than the three-year average between 2018 and 2020.

Concussions most recently garnered public and media attention following Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s series of concussions and botched concussion evaluations. After hitting his head on the turf during a game against the Buffalo Bills on Sept. 25, Tagovailoa was removed from the game but allowed to return for the match’s second half. Four days later, he was carted off during a game at Cincinnati’s Paycor Stadium after a hit that left him

recent player health scare, and sparked an uproar of media outlets and citizens all questioning the safety of the sport.

As a result of these hazards, professional football has one of the highest injury rates of any professional sport. Pro football players are injured 64.7 times for every 1,000 games played, compared to 49.4, 19.3, and 3.6 in ice hockey, basketball, and baseball, respectively. But the sport’s danger and brutality is what makes it prime entertainment for its millions of fans.

“The commodity spectacle of football has a market in part because fans want to extract meaning from the sport that they’re watching, and in order for them to extract meaning, the stakes of the game have to seem as if they’re life or death,” author and assistant professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick Nathan Kalman-Lamb explained on an episode of the podcast “The Takeaway.”

By John Ernst Sports Editor

For the sport of baseball, March is the month of change. With spring training comes the new rules that Major League Baseball (MLB) pilots, especially after the new collective bargaining agreement ratified by MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association last March. These new rules, such as the permanent extra-inning runner on second base and the controversial pitch clock, have shortened games and angered fans. However, with the World Baseball Classic (WBC) coming up soon, the attention will likely switch from the new rules to baseball’s dumbed-down version of the World Cup. Here are my takes for the upcoming season and all that awaits us in 2023.

New rules

incapacitated on the field. On Dec. 25, 2022, Tagovailoa again hit his head on the ground during a game against the Green Bay Packers and stayed in the game, only for the Dolphins to report the following week that he had suffered another concussion.

Following the controversy surrounding Tagovailoa’s concussions, the NFL strengthened its concussion protocol to prevent similar situations in the future. The new protocol states that a diagnosis of “ataxia” is now on the no-go list, which means players will enter the game if they

Despite the grievous risk of playing professional football, however, NFL player contracts and post-injury protocols are designed to make players expendable and replaceable. For instance, NFL players are only paid after suffering an injury if their contract explicitly mandates it. The Bills placed Hamlin on the injury reserve list after his cardiac arrest, and he lost his pay guarantee—while his four-year, $3.65 million contract meant he was set to earn $825,000 in 2022, his injury reserve split rate is $455,000. Hamlin was only paid in full after the NFL and the NFL Players Association settled his contract.

Garbage. All of these new rules are part of league commissioner Rob Manfred’s quest to slow down games and make baseball a more compact and fun experience. But even if he gains new fans, he’s losing the old ones. Real baseball fans enjoy the long games and don’t mind the tense extra innings. Home runs and strikeouts have been prioritized, while pitcher’s duels and small ball—bunting and stealing bases—have been put on the backburner. The second base runner rule is blasphemous, meant to end games more quickly in extra innings.

a quarterfinal format that will see the top two teams from each pool face off.

The tournament’s immense value lies in the representation and excitement it should and will bring to baseball. Like the World Cup and Olympics for soccer and hockey, respectively, the WBC allows players to compete for their countries of origin. Although just over 70 percent of the MLB is U.S.-born, Latino players make up 32 percent of the league and come from 13 countries and territories in Central and South America. With rising stars such as Bahamian Jazz Chisholm, who will be featured on the cover of the “MLB The Show 23” video game, and Venezuelan Robert Acuña Jr., the WBC is bringing huge amounts of representation to baseball and the MLB.

The tournament favorites this year are the Dominican Republic, United States, and Japan, all countries that routinely bring talent to the competition. Those three nations share the only four WBC championships—Japan won in 2006 and 2009, while the Dominican Republic and U.S. came out on top in 2013 and 2017, respectively. Like the World Cup, however, the countries who pop up unexpectedly also contribute to the excitement. Three teams will make their debuts at this year’s tournament: Nicaragua, Great Britain, and the Czech Republic.

2023 season

demonstrate abnormality of balance and stability, motor coordination, or speech.

In addition to CTE and concussions, professional football players also face less predictable risks in sudden cardiac events. In January, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the field at Paycor Stadium after tackling another player. The widely publicized incident is football’s most

Off-field injuries are treated with an even greater lack of concern. In 2021, Denver Broncos’ offensive tackle Ja’Wuan James was injured during an independent practice. The team placed him on the non-football injury list before releasing him a week later, allowing the organization to forgo paying him the $10.58 million salary he was due.

This deficit of support and safety for players thus makes professional football difficult to support, especially when it results in life-threatening injuries and takes advantage of players while they are injured. Without a greater consideration for its players, football cannot continue to be “America’s sport.”

The pitch clock rule is a whole other beast. Pitchers get 15 seconds between pitches with bases empty, and 20 seconds when there are runners on. Not only will there be less tension in late innings when every pitch becomes important, but pitchers who are throwing harder than ever will have less time to recover after each pitch. Imagine throwing 100+ mph and then having to be ready to throw it again right away. Players will be able to adapt and learn to work with the rule, but expect to see more injuries at the beginning of the year.

World Baseball Classic

Huge win. Fun, representative, and international play—something baseball desperately needs to grow the sport. The quadrennial event was last won by the U.S. in 2017, but after COVID-19 postponed the 2021 competition, the tournament was rescheduled for 2023. This fifth edition of the WBC will run from March 8 to March 21, starting with a pool stage before moving to

Lots of excitement. Arguably one of the biggest offseasons of all time has culminated in this, and the movement of pitching around the league will make October chases very interesting. The two divisions to keep an eye out for this year will be the National League (NL) East and the American League (AL) West. The NL East boasts three of the best teams in baseball with the Braves, Mets, and Phillies, as well as the former Cy Young winner Sandy Alcántara. The AL West features the best pitcher in baseball, Jacob deGrom, who moved to the Rangers this winter. The Rangers are expected to compete with the championship-defending Astros, as well as the Mariners and Angels. March means a lot of things, and although the beginning of baseball may be outshone by March Madness, the 2023 season should surely deliver the highlights and excitement baseball fans desire. Pending pitchers can get their pitches off in time.

SOPHIA LI

For the U.S.’s sweetheart sport to put players at such risk while treating them as commodities is unacceptable.

ALEXANDER LIU

Club sports roundup

A look into Blair’s niche sports

By Raunak Banerjee and Amen Lemiesa Staff Writers

Crew

Blair crew came off of a successful spring 2022 season, sending both its men’s and women’s teams to the Scholastic Rowing Association of America National Championship—the first time Blair qualified for the competition in a decade. Now, the Blazers are hard at work training to top their last season’s performance.

During the fall and spring, Blair crew takes a bus to the Bladensburg Waterfront Park on the Anacostia River after school for water practice. In the winter season, however, frigid temperatures make it next to impossible for the team to get on the water, so they bring their conditioning to the halls of Blair.

Clocking in at an average nine hours of practice per week, rowers perform full-body workouts and perfect their form on rowing machines called ergs to prepare themselves for the upcoming spring season. “Conditioning is exactly what the winter season is about,” junior rower Jan Walter-Drop says.

Once you finish [rowing training], people just go up to other people and start motivating them with [like] “you can do it”, “you got this”... which motivates you.

Once the team begins their competitive spring season, they will compete in races known as regattas against teams from other schools. “[We] do regattas, which means you have a boat of eight or six people, depending on how big your team is. Then you have sprints in the distance of 1,500 meters against different schools,” Walter-Drop explains.

For Walter-Drop, one of the best aspects of being on crew is

the supportive community. “Once you finish [rowing training], people just go up to other people and start motivating them with speeches and you know, with ‘you can do it,’ ‘you got this,’” he says. “You are even more proud of yourself once you’ve done it.”

With winter training wrapping up, the team is ready to take their painstaking practice to the waterfront and take the program to new heights. “I think there’s a level of intensity that we haven’t quite hit yet, a level of focus to be competitive with the programs in the area,” Blair men’s crew head coach Perrin Salewood says. “I think we just need a little switch in our mindset and I think we’re right there.”

Ice hockey

The Blair club ice hockey team is the only one of its kind in the DCC. As such, the team’s roster includes students from Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Wheaton, and Northwood, although the majority of players are from Blair. Despite their different backgrounds and school rivalries, the team members have been able to foster a unique sense of camaraderie.

“We all get along. You learn a lot about other schools [and] there’s no ani mosity between schools,” se nior alternate captain Alex Heimov says. “Nobody’s butting heads. We’re all one team.”

varsity sports, Blair ice hock ey competes against teams from other MCPS schools such as Bethes da-Chevy Chase, Walter Johnson, and Richard Montgomery during the regular season before participating in a countywide playoff. However, as a club sport, the

team receives no funding from MCPS, leaving students and their families to shoulder the entire cost

of participation. “If you’re on the team, you have to pay a fee and

you have to bring all your own equipment,” Heimov explains. Heimov attributes this lack of financial support to the high cost associated with ice hockey. “For the varsity sports, the schools and the school district have to provide equipment, a place to play, and time to play, which, for hockey, is extremely expensive, more so than pretty much any other sport,” he says. Indeed, in addition to buying their own equipment, the team rents out a 90-minute time slot from the Wheaton Ice Arena for practices each week. Heimov believes that subsidizing even a fraction of these costs with funding from the county could give more students the opportunity to play competitively for their school.

“Just covering how much it costs to register as a team for the ice time would be a huge help to making [playing on an ice hockey team] more accessible,” Heimov says.

Covering how much it costs to register as a team for the ice time would be a huge help to making [playing on an ice hockey team] more accessible.

Ultimate frisbee

The ultimate frisbee season runs through the entirety of the school year. During the fall and spring seasons, the team practices on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. The practices previously took place on the track field, but because of ongoing construction,

they are now held on the practice field behind Blair. The current winter season is less structured and includes practices for two hours every Tuesday and a competitive indoor league not affiliated with Blair.

As a team captain, junior Henry Viechnicki tries to foster a laidback but physically challenging experience for club members. “Frisbee is a lower commitment than other sports, but you still get the same level of athleticism required,” he says. “I find it really, really fun, [and] it’s pretty quick to pick up because a lot of the basics can be seen in other sports.”

I find [frisbee] really fun… [and] it’s pretty quick to pick up because a lot of the basics can be seen in other sports.

On the competitive end, Blair ultimate frisbee plays against the three other MCPS teams and one D.C. team in their league. Although the team does not actively track its season record, its tournament records are its metric for success. “What matters the most are the tournaments. If we win a tournament, we’re happy, and if we lose, we try and get better,” Viechnicki explains.

After placing 25th in a heat of 30 and fourth in a heat of five, the team acknowledges that there is room for improvement. Both Viechnicki and senior co-captain Mateo Bolen partially attribute the team’s defeats to an inability to close out in the latter portion of the games. “We kept most of our games competitive and close,” Bolen says. “It’s just sometimes we couldn’t finish it out.”

At the end of the day, regardless of individual match outcomes, the team’s ultimate goal is simply to play hard and enjoy each other’s company. “Everyone does get to play. It’s very inclusive,” Viechnicki says. “The games are competitive, but the individual players are not… They’re trying their hardest, but if they lose, okay, whatever. It’s sort of a low-key sport.”

ALEX HEIMOV

HENRY VIECHNICKI

PHOTO BY MADELINE GOLD

PHOTO COURTESY OF OLEN STEPHENS

PHOTO BY FIONA BONDAREV

ACTION ON THE ICE Albert Einstein sophomore Jack Martindill finishes a hit on a St. John’s College High School Player