The Spectator The Stuyvesant High School Newspaper
Volume CIV No. 4
• Senior Michael Lim and junior Kelly Chen were recognized as regional finalists in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science, & Technology. Seniors Jack Cahn and Eugene Lee were recognized as two of 331 semifinalists. The finalists will move onto the regional finals at M.I.T. next month to compete for a $100,000 scholarship. • Research coordinator Rebecca Gorla and senior Mandy Wong were invited to attend the Lasker Foundation award ceremony. This prestigious program, “American Nobel Prize,” honored outstanding students and others for their contributions. • Social studies teacher George Kennedy took a number of his Wall Street students to visit the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street. Students received a tour, a presentation, and a talk with founder John Herzog. • The Junior Statesmen of America Club (JSA) attended the Barnard College conference in New York. Five Stuyvesant students won best speaker awards, and several of them did so in more than one category. • Criminal Law teacher Linda Weissman facilitated a presentation for her students by Arun Bhoumick (’97), a federal prosecutor with the Justice Department in Washington. He spoke about the criminal justice process, with a focus on his specialty of business fraud.
Why Don’t They Work? By COBY GOLDBERG and ANDREW WALLACE “‘And now a rather common sight: non-working escalators.’ That’s one of the first things my tour guide told my family and I [sic] when we were at the open house for Stuyvesant in eighth grade,” junior Eric Chen said. “Now I know that it’s Stuy, land of the broken escalators.” Since the construction of the new school building in 1992, escalators have become a part of Stuyvesant culture. Unfortunately, so too has the sight of non-working ones. By eighth period on any given day in 2013, an average of 65 percent of escalators are functioning. In fact, the condition of the escalators has been deemed Priority Three by the Division of School Facilities (DSF), the branch of the Department of Education (DOE) responsible for the physical maintenance of DOE buildings. The category indicates that “visual observation or comments from staff indicate a failure may occur in the near future,” according to a DSF report. The status of the escalators has remained despite the fact that in the summer of 2004, the school accepted nearly one million dollars in DOE funds for the overhaul of the escalator system. “The breakdowns that used to happen lasted longer and happened more
frequently than after they renovated them,” Lauren Segal (‘06) said in a telephone interview. Escalator stoppages at Stuyvesant reflect three separate factors: structural damage, deliberate or accidental interference with the escalator, and lack of school policy on restarting escalators midday. The first and less common category, permanent breakdowns in the escalators’ underlying mechanics, is not necessarily a result of misuse by the student body but is often a result of age and frequent use. For example, frequent use can cause pores to form in the metal of the escalator, necessitating that the escalator metal be re-welded so that the pores are closed. The school contacts the DSF, which has contracted the Otis Elevator Company to repair escalators with these serious breakdowns. DSF then processes the school’s request and calls Otis, which usually sends a crew within two weeks. The crews close off the escalator under maintenance with yellow boards and often lift up the steps in order to do such work, leaving the escalator entirely unusable. “They have the maintenance crews come in for stuff like the four-totwo [escalator], which needed to be re-welded.” school machinist Kern Levigion said. The second and more com-
Courtesy of The Indicator
Getting the Girls: The Story of Stuyvesant’s First Women
Abby Scheck, class of ‘72, comments on the experience of being a part of the first female class at Stuyvesant High School.
By Arina Bykadorova Gentlemen, imagine life without girls. Ballroom dancing? Forget it. Big Sib Little Sib dance? Boring. Prom? Man, have to take out some of those silly Hunter girls. Sound like a nightmare? Forty years ago, this was Stuyvesant. As the 1970 Indicator puts it, Stuy was “one of the last bastions of
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all-male education” until the school “finally opened to coeducation and its accompanying benefits.” It all began with a girl who didn’t want to go to Bronx Science. In 1968, Alice Haines, nee DeRivera, was a freshman at John Jay High School looking for an academic challenge. Despite scoring above the cutoff for Stuyvesant on the SHSAT, she was denied admission because of the school’s all-male policy. Not wanting to commute two hours to Bronx Science, which had also accepted her (and had been co-ed since 1946), Haines sued. The Board of Education faced charges of denying Haines equal protection of the law and struggled for a few months before giving in. In September of 1969, Stuyvesant was obliged to open its doors to female students. Twelve brave souls enrolled that year, nine of them incoming sophomores. Haines ultimately did not attend Stuyvesant because her family had moved upstate to avoid publicity. Last June, as the keynote speaker for
the graduation for the class of 2013, she received an honorary Stuyvesant diploma. Time has scattered the pioneers of 1969. Few were available to talk, but one of the nine sophomores, Abby Scheck (’72), met with me for an interview on the wind-blown boardwalk of Brighton Beach. Her face was reminiscent of the girl whose senior photo I found in the yearbook, and she smiled while looking back on her days at Stuy. “It was without a doubt the best educational experience of my life. If there was some way in the universe that I could do it again, I would,” she said. Though in a time of many political statements, breaking Stuyvesant’s policy was not a political stand for the frontierswomen. This was no crusade for women’s rights; “None of us were hotheaded politically,” Scheck said, and she chose Stuyvesant, or “Stuyvesant chose me, initially for geographic reasons.” continued on page #
mon stoppage in service is less serious, and is caused by the escalators’ great volume of day-to-day usage. Such stoppages occur when certain safety mechanisms are triggered.
These can be activated by such things as dangling backpack continued on page 2
Administration Removes Students from Half-Floor By Gabriel Rosen and Jordan Zhou In response to a growing number of noise complaints, security guards have adopted a policy of removing students from the half-floor when deemed necessary. This is a result of increased student congregation on the half-floor over the years. As of this year, when a nearby teacher complains about noise, the area is evacuated completely at the discretion of the security guards. According to Principal Jie Zhang, “no policy change has been made” regarding the half floor, and students are still allowed to stay there in a quiet manner during their free periods. As such, the removal of students is only a stricter enforcement of old policy regarding noise complaints. In the past, only limited amounts of noise complaints were made regarding the half-floor. However, with the increased number of students congregating there, removals have had to occur according to school pol-
icy. Zhang also said that even though most classrooms are far from the half-floor, she still receives complaints from teachers like music teacher Holly Hall when she is trying to conduct chorus sectionals, as well as from faculty advisors supervising clubs on the second floor. The most common complaint by students who have been removed from the halffloor is that the limited amount of free space available to them forces them to stay on the halffloor in large numbers, which inevitably leads to an increase in noise there, according to students who asked to remain anonymous. When questioned about these complaints, Zhang said, “We understand that there are some capacity issues, but students always need to be respectful of classes in session.” In September 2012, the administration banned students from congregating in the fifth floor hallway, which forced students to the first, second, and half floor. Seniors are now alcontinued on page 2
Jin Hee Yoo / The Spectator
Newsbeat
October 31, 2013
“The Pulse of the Student Body”