senior studies abroad in italy
Page 6 Conestoga High School, Berwyn PA, 19312
Volume 74 No. 3
December 5, 2023
Say no to the perm-idemic: it’s shear madness!
PagE 8
On pointe: Senior strives for ballet expertise
Page 12
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community feels toll of israelhamas war By Aren Framil and Faith Zantua, Co-News Editor and Co-Copy Editor Sophomore Aries Serinsky, co-president of the Jewish Student Alliance (JSA), was overcome with emotion when they learned that their 10-year-old sister began selling bracelets to donate to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, a nonprofit that supports Israeli soldiers, amidst the present Israel-Hamas war. “After the initial attack by Hamas, (my family and I) were all so upset and traumatized. I guess she just wanted to do something, and so she started making these bracelets,” Serinsky said. “I was actually calling my mother after school one day, and she told me that my sister had started doing it. I burst into tears. It makes me really happy that she’s doing something and that it’s some-
thing that is just so wholesome.” Sophomore Rayan Niaz helped the Muslim Student Association (MSA) run an in-school bake sale to raise money for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which provides aid to Palestinians displaced by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “We just want to support our Muslim brothers and sisters and other people as well because there’s also other religious groups in (the Palestinian territories),” said Niaz, MSA treasurer. “It’s in our religion and in our hearts to support people in need.” The ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, which is part of the greater ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has spurred some students and community members to take action and aid those involved in the war. Continued on page 3.
boys soccer wins piaa 4a state title Lily Chen/The SPOKE
Double overtime: Senior Ryan Zellefrow headbutts the soccer ball during the Nov. 17 Boys Soccer PIAA 4A State Championship game. After the Pioneers ended the second half of the game and the first round of overtime tied 1-1, Zellefrow scored the game-winning goal in the second round of overtime.
Juliana Yao
Co-Sports Editor In a close 2-1 win against Central Bucks South High School, the boys’ varsity soccer team took home its sixth state championship title in its history. This victory marked the
Pioneers as the PIAA 4A boys soccer team with the most state championship titles. At the end of the season, the U.S. Soccer Coaches Association ranked the Pioneers as the second-best high school boys soccer team in the country, the highest this associa-
tion has ever ranked the ’Stoga team. The boys also claimed the 2023 season’s triple crown as they won the PIAA Central League, District 1 and 4A State Championships. They ended the season with an overall record of 24-0-1.
Seventeen of the 31 members of this year’s team were seniors, marking the 2023 team as having one of the largest proportions of seniors in Conestoga’s history. Head coach David Zimmerman said that a significant factor in the team’s accomplishments this
season was how strong these senior players were. “The senior class is certainly one of the best ever, if not the best ever,” Zimmerman said. “Just the talent level was really spectacular — we didn’t lose a game.” Continued on page 10.
Berwyn School Fight added to curricula Howard Kim Co-News Editor
Beginning this year, TESD officially added the district’s Berwyn School Fight in the 1930s to its third, eighth and 10th grade social studies curricula. With the addition, students in those grades will learn about the history of the district’s decision in 1932 to segregate its schools and the local Black community’s legal battles throughout the following two years to eventually reverse the change. The addition to curricula will also focus on where students can see remnants of this history around the district. For example, the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Devon was one of several local meeting places community leaders used to plan how they would fight the school board’s decision and return to integrated schooling. As a result of this curricula change, students will first gain exposure to this topic in third grade and progressively delve
deeper into the history in eighth and 10th grades. “Our goal is to really give students the appropriate background information that they need to be able to understand these events, so this is their first introduction to it,” said Dr. Matthew Sterenczak, TESD curriculum supervisor for social studies. “It’s not just teaching the school fight, but it’s also this idea of discrimination.” In eighth grade, students will revisit the topic to focus on the perspectives of the people involved in the Berwyn School Fight. In 10th grade U.S. History classes, high schoolers will dive deeper into the circumstances that enabled Black community members to fight segregation in the Berwyn School Fight. The additions to the curricula aim to push students to draw deeper connections from history to the T/E community today. “It’s to honor and understand the legacy of the people that made this community what it is today,” Sterenczak
said. “As communities evolve and shift and change, it’s always important to understand what was here before and what are the stories that shaped this community and still have an impact in this community.” Prior to the official curricula implementation this year, some teachers in the middle schools and Conestoga already independently incorporated parts of this history into their lessons. Freshman Sukanya Menon, a member of the Student Leaders’ Antiracist Movement club and student member of the school board diversity committee, first learned about this part of local history in her social studies class last year. “Honestly, I was really shocked, considering (my experience) as a student in the district right now and how inclusive we are,” Menon said. “To see the district in such a different position was really shocking for me, especially because it wasn’t even brought to my attention until I was an
eighth grader. I was kind of caught off guard.” Many T/E students, like Menon, first learned about the Berwyn School Fight in middle or high school. The topic remained largely unmentioned at the elementary school level due to the lack of an official curriculum for it. By including the Berwyn School Fight in third grade social studies classes, Sterenczak hopes that students in the district will learn about it earlier and spend more time building on their knowledge and understanding of it as they get older. “We want all students to be able to have this experience. We want to deliver it age appropriately. We want to align with our curriculum, but we also want students to be able to understand that this is an important part of history,” Sterenczak said. “The goal was to make sure that we can revisit it to highlight its importance and to build upon the knowledge that we have.”
Ben Shapiro/The SPOKE
Taped off: TESD Maintenance Director Colm Kelly closed three of the six first-floor, single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms in early November. He fished eight vape pens out of the bathrooms’ pipes on Nov. 7.
8 vapes flushed down toilets Ben Shapiro Editor-in-Chief
Howard Kim/The SPOKE
Historical haven: The Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Devon has a Pennsylvania state historical marker. Black community leaders met at the church to plan their next steps in the Berwyn School Fight in the 1930s.
TESD Maintenance Director Colm Kelly fished eight vape pens out of Conestoga’s sewage pipes on Nov. 7. Since then, three of the six firstfloor, single-stall, gender-neutral bathrooms outside of Room 124 have remained closed due to multiple vape pens and some feminine products clogging their pipes. Kelly said that at the start of the school year, he found that students were putting an increasing number of vape pens in the bathrooms’ ceiling tiles. To discourage this behavior, he secured the ceiling tiles in place, which he believes led to students discarding their vape pens by flushing them down the toilets. “People gotta understand that they hurt every-
body when they put things down the sewer line that they shouldn’t,” Kelly said. “It takes a lot of time (to fix), and we have a couple of bathrooms shut down as a result. It’s a shame, really.” Kelly said that due to the intensity of the restoration project and the disruption it will create, the district will most likely not be able to fix the bathrooms during the school year. He estimated that the process to repair the pipes will take around three weeks to complete. “We’re going to have to cut the concrete floor open, cut the pipe and remove whatever is down there,” Kelly said. “It’s a bigger project than most realize and it can’t be done in a week.” Assistant principal Dr. Patrick Boyle, who oversees the school’s facilities, has found that the privacy that bath-
rooms provide students has historically led to students abusing the spaces. The 2021 addition of the vast majority of the school’s gender-neutral, single-stall bathrooms emphasized this trend. “What I’ve seen is that it’s still the same level of activities happening, but there’s far more places to do it,” Boyle said. He said that he has witnessed and dealt with students flushing objects down toilets before, but never to the extent that required him to close off a block of bathrooms. “I wish there was a way that kids could really think more clearly,” Boyle said. “But they’re teenagers: they make mistakes. Our job is to help them not make the same mistake again and understand the fault in their ways so they can make better decisions for themselves.”