Issue 14, Volume 106

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The Spectator

“The Pulse of the Student Body”

The Stuyvesant High School Newspaper

Volume 106  No. 14

April 22, 2016

Only One Overnight College Trip to Be Held This Year

NEWSBEAT

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he Muslim Students Association’s Noor-al-Stuy team won the championship at the New York Regional Muslim Interscholastic Tournament at Columbia University from Friday March 25, to Sunday, March 27.

Danielle Eisenman / The Spectator

dzingha Prescott (’10) has been named to the U.S. Women’s Olympic Fencing Team for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. This will be her second time on the Olympic Team.

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eniors Nicholas Beasley, David Rothblatt, Henry Walker, and Lucas Weiner won first place as a team at the New York State Economics Challenge.

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he Model United Nations (MUN) Club won Best Large Delegation at the George Washington University MUN Conference from Thursday, March 31, to Sunday, April 3. Twenty students won awards or honors, including seven Best Delegate awards.

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enior Nicholas Beasley advanced through the first two rounds of the Physics Olympiad and will compete in the final round to join the national team.

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he Ocean Bowl Team took third place at the 2016 Bay Scallop Bowl competition at Stonybrook University on Saturday, March 5.

Juniors touring the University of Pennsylvania, one of the six colleges or universities visited during the Mid-Atlantic overnight college trip, held from April 1 to April 2.

By Anne George, Julia Ingram, and Blythe Zadrozny Junior Caucus President Namra Zulfiqar and Vice President Enver Ramadani announced on Tuesday, March 22, through the Junior Caucus Facebook page that there will only be one overnight college trip this year. Typically, juniors have had the opportunity to go on two or three overnight college trips, planned by a staff member, usually a college counselor, and facilitated by frequent correspondence with the Junior Caucus. Last year, two trips were organized by Former College Counselor Jeremy Wang, who left Stuyvesant at the end of the 2015-16 school year to work as a guidance counselor at Townsend Harris High School. This year, newly hired Director of College Counseling Jeffery Makris planned the trip. When Zulfiqar and Ramadani ran for Junior Caucus, they

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he Envirothon Teams took first and second place at their Regional Competition on Friday, April 15. The first place team, consisting of juniors Nadia Filanovsky and Kaia Waxenberg and seniors Mohammed Shium, Darren Lin, and Henry Walker, will be going to the state competition in May.

Features A&E

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The administration is not offering waiver forms for Advanced Placement (AP) courses during programming for the Fall 2016 semester. In the past, the forms, which needed to be signed by a parent and a guidance counselor, allowed students to take more AP courses than the number the school had recommended based on their cumulative grade-point average. The decision to abandon the waivers is part of a long-term effort by the School Leadership Team (SLT), the guidance department, and other administrators to reduce student stress. “While there are students who can, and do, handle taking more APs than their overall average would set them up for according to the Stuyvesant policy, there are more students who really struggle,” Assistant Principal of English Eric Grossman said. “Not really hav-

ing a cap on the number of APs [...] creates a situation where everybody feels pressured to take more and more and more.” The grade cutoffs for taking AP courses are still the same, but will be adhered to more strictly. All students can take one AP course, an 88 or above allows for two, a 93 or above allows for three, and a 95 or above allows for four. Many students were opposed to the change when it was first announced on Monday, March 29. “I didn’t have any problem with [the waiver system],” senior Lola Makombo said. “We shouldn’t be limiting the number of AP classes students can have. [The number] honestly depends on the student.” Having acknowledged this dissent, Principal Jie Zhang is considering creating an appeals process to allow exceptions for students who have legitimate

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Makris spent a combined total of 60 hours planning the trip, between chartering three buses from a Department of Education (DOE) approved vendor, clearing the insurance papers, making hotel reservations for 40 rooms, and finding 10 faculty chaperones. When Zulfiqar and Ramadani tried to contact him to begin planning for the next trip, they were told there was not going to be a second trip, due to the other demands of his job. “If you round up and you figure a working week is almost 35 hours, that is almost two weeks he was doing nothing but planning the trip,” Pedrick said. “He is a college counselor and he needs to be meeting with families and he needs to be making plans for presentations and things that we do to run the college office successfully, and that ended up equalling there only being one trip this year.” Makris believes that in the future it is unlikely that he will be able to plan more than one trip while upholding his responsibility as a college counselor. “I know [students] are disappointed but I want to make it clear that I do see these trips as valuable,” Makris said. “But […] I have to be providing direct services to students and their families. In a school of highly driven and motivated students, it is difficult to envision a scenario in which I can do that while planning more than one trip without having someone lighten that load. It is not realistic,” Makris said. Though Zulfiqar and Ramadani were aware that there would only be one college trip on Tuesday, February 23, they delayed notifying the student body for a month while they tried to work around the situa-

tion. First, they proposed planning the college trips themselves. “We said we’d put in all the work that was required, [Coordinator of Student Affairs Matthew] Polazzo would help […] we just need [the administration] to sign off on it,” Ramadani said. However, there are restrictions placed on student involvement during the planning of college trips. “Students can’t book hotels and we can’t have students reach out to schools. Although the student body can help us with some things, there are some things that need to be [done] by the employed professionals. As high school students there only so much of a role they can play,” Makris said. The Junior Caucus understood the administration’s reasoning. “It’s not an extremely abnormal thing for a student to contact a college to plan a trip, [but] Stuyvesant brings such a large group of people to the colleges, [and] that’s just a lot to accommodate,” Zulfiqar said. However, Zulfiqar and Ramadani were willing to invest their time and effort into planning additional college trips. They even contemplated creating a “College Trip Planning” club to plan the college trips as club trips, but realized this would not be an effective solution. “Eventually it would go through to Zhang and she would realize we were trying to plan that trip and not sign off on it,” Zulfiqar said. “[We realized] we’re at a dead end now,” Ramadani said. At this point, the Junior Caucus decided to petition the administration to allow future Caucuses to plan the trips on their own, to prevent this from happening to future juniors. Should they be continued on page 2

Are You In Favor of the New AP Policy? By Shaina Peters

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he Chess Team, consisting of sophomores Shaina Peters, Charlie Reeder, and Daniel Regassa, and junior William Yen finished in second place in the Under 1900 competition in Atlanta, Georgia, from Friday, April 1, to Monday, April 4.

had promised that there would be three, and maybe even four, overnight college trips. However, at the beginning of the 2016-17 school year, they were notified that this would not be possible. “In September we had a meeting with all of the college counselors, and [Assistant Principal of Guidance Casey] Pedrick, and we established that we would have two trips,” Ramadani said. “[College Counselor Jeaurel] Wilson said she was in favor of three trips. She thought it would be possible. Makris [who would be planning the trips] said it was unfeasible.” Zulfiqar and Ramadani attempted to begin preparations for the first college trip, which they anticipated would take place in the fall, in August 2015. However, when they reached out to Makris, they were notified that they would be unable to begin planning until that September, since Makris was not yet an official employee. From the beginning of the school year until mid-February,

AP Waiver Forms Eliminated

By Shameek Rakshit and Julian Rubinfien

WHAT’S INSIDE?

stuyspec.com

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No

80.8%

*0.05% of students chose not to answer this question

Yes 18.7%

Turn to page 3 for the full poll on AP culture at Stuyvesant.

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