Trojan Horse
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What is senioritis? A condition that strikes high school seniors. Symptoms include frequent head aches, complaints of stress, random hyperventilation, violent mood swings and a disinterest in schoolwork. There is no cure. Treatments include snow days, prolonged vacation periods or graduation.
How to get away with sleeping in class?
What does Mr. Groom get from the vending machine?
At what age should you stop playing on jungle gyms?
Draw eyes on your eyelids.
Chile Picante Corn Nuts.
Never, now go kick that kid off the slide!
No. 5
01. 09.
Culture Shock
07. Tatted Trojans
13.
Surviving Yesterday Identity
17. Wilson’s Water
Adrianne Nix Editor in Chief Junior
Natalie Jenkins Editor in Chief Junior
Keith Higbee Staff Advisor
Monika Kovacs Head of Design Junior
Tana Kelley Photo Editor Junior
Brian Chatard Principal
According to Oregon law, student journalists are responsible for determining the content of this publication, except under limited circumstances. The subject matter, content and views of the news, features and opinion sections in this paper do not reflect the views of Portland Public Schools or Woodrow Wilson High School.
CULTURE SHOCK
May 2014
ONE TEACHER’S STRUGGLE TO FEEL ACCEPTED, AND HELP HER STUDENTS FEEL THE SAME
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No. 5
Ellen Whatmore is no stranger to feeling different. A California native, her five foot eight stature, blonde hair and blue eyes are the classic looks of a textbook American woman. But whereas nobody would think anything about it in the states, her looks caused her to stick out among the uniformed crowds of Himeji, Japan, where she taught for a year and a half. As a result, her experiences there have influenced her approach to ESL teaching at Wilson High School. One can often tell a great deal about somebody by the way they walk. Whatmore walks with a certain purpose from place to place. She holds herself high, proudly even, and her boots click rapidly at each step of her brisk pace. However, she is far from aloof. Ask any of her students, and they would be sure to tell you otherwise. “I can’t [exactly] tell how, but she’s nice,” Elric Wu, a Chinese-American sophomore and a former student of hers, said.
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May 2014
Whatmore wearing kimonos with her fellow teachers in Japan.
English and empathy are Whatmore’s forte. With her encouraging tone and friendly demeanor, it is easy to see why she was assigned the very position that needed these qualities the most: teaching English to ESL students. The loneliness and anxiety that these students feel upon first entering high school in America is wholly comparable to just how overwhelmed Whatmore felt in Japan. Consequently, she finds that she empathizes greatly with her ESL students. “[They] are doing something above and beyond what any of our other students are doing,” she said. Whatmore is currently in charge of two types of ESL classes along with her regular English classes: Honors
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ELD (English Language Development), which is similar to how native English-speaking students learn foreign languages such as Spanish; and Language Arts 1-2, which is a beginners level of normal English classes. Whatmore’s history with teaching in foreign countries
Whatmore with fellow teachers in Japan.
traces all the way back to her college years. As a student she attended the college of UCSD in San Diego, and even though she had been fairly indecisive over choosing her major, she had known that teaching would be endgame for her; even as a high schooler, she had known this. Come junior year of college, Whatmore put her Education minor to use after leaving for Sydney, Australia, to learn under an English teaching program called CELTA (Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults). After being a student under this program for a short period of time, she transitioned into her first teaching role after she relocated to Melbourne, where she was hired as a substitute English
No. 5 teacher to English learners. This dose of overseas teaching gave Whatmore just enough incentive to take on her biggest challenge in her teaching career at the age of 23, which came in the form of her next out-of-country gig in Japan. She taught at a private language school called an “eikaiwa,” which roughly translates to “English conversation.” The eighteen months she spent there helped jumpstart the compassion she feels for her ESL students today. Whatmore says that out of all the countries she has taught at, Japanese students held the prize for being the most studious, although that was more due to culture than choice. “Japanese [culture] is just one of overwork, to the point where kids are just fulltime students. They are in class until 3:30, and then they go to the eikaiwa and do their English lessons, and then they go to cram school at night.” She has made a point to bring back aspects of this practice into her own classroom. She lays the smack
down in her Language Arts 1-2 class, whose students are given little to no allowance to speak their native language. She believes that the speaking and listening components that were huge in the eikaiwa are just as important everywhere else. The difference between her curric-
race. “Sometimes it felt like they didn’t expect me to be able to do the same things they could do, just because I was different,” Whatmore said. Similarly, her Caucasian looks frequently landed her in uncomfortable situations. She would often be recognized around town for her distinctive looks and approached by strangers. “Strangers knew who I was . . . and they would come up to me and say things like, ‘Oh, I saw you at the store last week.’” At the start, this type of attention was completely benign, though awkward. Various strangers who wanted to speak with her in an effort to practice their English also approached her. Although initially being flattered by the attention from these Japanese locals, that feeling eventually and inevitably turned to resentment. “I was off the clock, but I was still available to be an English instructor,” she said. Sometimes the attention Whatmore received was less
“Sometimes it felt like they didn’t expect me to be able to do some things they could do, just because I was different.” ulums in Japan and America, however, is that she learned how to incorporate grammar into the speaking and listening lessons. In the year and a half that she lived in Japan, she discovered an unexpected bias against her work ethic, simply due to her skin color. A few of her Japanese coworkers at the eikaiwa seemed to think that her capability was compromised by the limitations of her
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May 2014
Whatmore with a classroom display of the places she’s travelled.
than innocent. Day after day, she would enter her meager Japanese apartment with an air of resignation. It wasn’t new that a seedy old man laid his smiling head on her shoulder in the subway. It wasn’t new that she was subtly followed or watched by the same type of man. It wasn’t new that she felt afraid and unsafe. But at the end of the day, as she would switch on a comfortingly familiar American drama and relax into her futon, she would figure that her voracious, knowledge-hungry students made it worth it. This type of aggressive attention was entirely unwanted then, but it has made What-
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more all the more sympathetic toward her ESL student’s plights. During her short-lived occupation as the ESL case manager, she found that she had much more time in her day to interact with her students and ask about their other classes. Although the district has since removed that job, she still attempts to help her students out as much as possible. “I try to help them [build] the skills to advocate for themselves, to talk to their teachers on their own,” she said. Her attempts to help her students mostly focus on talking to their teachers when they are struggling in classes.
Language ended up being one of the most challenging aspects of living in Japan. It became essential to fully immerse herself in the language when reaching the country. English was not a commonly spoken language in her job, let alone in the rest of Himeji and Whatmore’s Japanese was limited. This made conversations with her friends difficult when they spoke in Japanese. She would become exhausted from being surrounded by the language every day, and so it became a custom for her to put on bad American television when arriving home from work. Not every ESL student at Wilson speaks a native language that is well known by the population, which makes their situations almost exactly like their teacher’s. The running parallels between their inexperience in a new society and Whatmore’s own ostracizing make her so much more sympathetic. “I also try to be mindful of the fact that they need an education not just in the language, but also in the culture of the school and of systems in the United States,” she said. Culture shock in Japan was a big issue for Whatmore. She
No. 5 had chosen to teach at Japan in the first place because she had had a highly romanticized idea of it. As a child she had lived in San Jose, California, where she says there are a huge population of Japanese-Americans. She recalls memories from her youth of visiting the local Japantown with her family. From that age she became fascinated by the Japanese culture, particularly its image of perfectionism and cleanliness. Therefore it was an even harsher blow when she reached Japan and found her former glamorized picture of it shattered. However, as much as it stunned Whatmore then, it has assisted her in identify-
ing with her ESL student’s own cultural disorientation. Whatmore faced discrimination almost every day from being the quintessential image of an American, much as her own foreign students do as well. When she did feel normal again, however, she did it with a vengeance. When she celebrated Halloween in Japan, she dressed in a Supergirl costume and biked her way to work whilst wearing it. After deciding that she would set her own terms for personal safety and comfort, she didn’t allow herself to become self-conscious by all the stares and points she received. Instead, she accepted that she would
always be given extra attention for her looks, try as hard as she might to blend in. It seems that she has shared this mindset with her students, voluntarily or not. “At that point, I’d been there for ten months, and I realized that I’m just going to embrace that I’m stared at all the time anyway.”
Erica Keaveney Junior Photos contributed by Ellen Whatmore and Tana Kelley Thoughts? Tweet @WHSTrojanHorse
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May 2014
TATTED TROJANS THE TALES OF THE TATTS
“It’s my family crest. I’m Scottish, so every Scottish clan has a family crest, and I’m the McKay clan and that’s our family crest. It says ‘Manu forti’ which means ‘with a strong hand’, and that’s why it has a hand holding a dagger. My dad and my brother have it as well.” Amanda McKay, senior
“It’s edelweiss, the flower. Like The Sound of Music. The song was my lullaby when I was little. The movie and the songs were the ones that I bonded with my great grandmother over. So it’s kind of like a memorial for her.” Ameilia Rathbun, senior
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No. 5 “I got the first one in October and I got the second in November. The first one I got is the one on my left wrist. It’s my dads initials. I got it mainly just because I wanted a tattoo, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted so I just thought ‘What is something I’m not going to regret? Probably my parent’s name.’ So I got it without them knowing, in a garage, but it was sanitary. And then I just came home with it, and my mom freaked out a little bit until she saw what it was, and then she was like ‘Yeah, I can’t really be mad.’ But then she was hurt that I got my dad’s initials and not hers, so I went back two months later and got her initials.” Teagan Aborn-Duffy, senior “I tell people that I got arrows because they’re swift, strong, and flexible, and those are traits that I aspire to be. But, the real story is that I knew I was going to Vegas for a weekend, so at the airport I drew up a design, and when my dad asked me why I did it, I said it was because I couldn’t drink and I couldn’t gamble so I might as well get a tattoo.” Vincent Hand, senior
“It was my pitbull when I was in middle school. We raised it and, then we had to sell it because it got too aggressive to some people. It was just the one that I hung around most and I liked the most. He loved me the best.”
Tana Kelley Junior
Austin Wallace Lister, senior
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May 2014
SURVIVING YESTERDAY
Backstage, Surviving Yesterday huddles together excited, but nervous. They all know they’re going to play great, and they reassure each other of it. After a speedy prayer to the rock gods, the huddle breaks, and the members return to last-minute practicing. All in their own musically-induced trances, the music streams in their minds like a mental iPod. Ethan Brenner strums on his unplugged guitar, Seth Greenberg readies his vocal cords, Zach Price slaps his bass silently, and Jake Perris hits invisible drums to a beat only he hears. Then, as if snapped out of hypnosis, the team rises and jogs on-stage, greeted by bright lights and a roaring crowd. Filled to the brim with a mixture of adrenaline and excitement, the band doesn’t hesitate to do what they do best: play.
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“It all started in seventh grade,” Brenner said. “Seth and I always wanted to be in a band, and we found a guitar and drum kit in Zach’s garage. So, Zach started playing the drums, I started playing guitar, and Seth bought a bass. For a little bit, we were just messing around, but then one day we all just decided to actually start something. That’s when Surviving Yesterday was born.” A short while later, a new drummer, Dane Sultzman, was added, and Price switched to bass, with Greenberg on vocals. After a year, however, Sultzman left, so the band picked up Jake Perris in the beginning of 2013, leaving the band with a line-up they hope to keep concrete. Ever since, they have all learned and grown in aspects of musical talents. “In Freshman year, at our first practice as a new band, we all sucked,”
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Perris said. Since Price’s original instrument had been drums, it was a large jump to switch to bass. “I didn’t know how to play bass at all when we started, so I started taking lessons for two years,” Price said. Other than Price, the rest of the band is mostly self-taught. “I took a few piano lessons growing up, and one or two guitar lessons,” Brenner said. “Guitar just felt right to me, and I just taught myself from there on out. Seth also took guitar lessons, and he’s in his school’s choir.” Although they all were good friends outside of the band, playing and learning their instruments together helped the group forge a stronger bond. “We’ve all grown as musicians,” Perris said. “We all went from being bad at our instruments,
to well, being good at them. And I don’t think we could have advanced that much if we weren’t together.” It’s a good thing that they get along, as all the different personalities in the band seem almost certain to clash. “Seth perfectly fits the lead singer stereotype,” Brenner said. “He’s crazy, he’s always late to practice, and he doesn’t pay attention when he does come.” “And he’s a drama queen!” Jake interjected, with laughs and nods from all three of them. Snickering, Price joked, “Ethan is definitely a control freak and we all hate him.” Which brought on laughter from everyone except Brenner. “Basically, we all fit the band stereotypes,” Perris said, “On top of those, the bassist is irrelevant,
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May 2014
The band huddles before a performance.
and the drummer has serious ADD issues. But in the end, we all have our own distinct personalities, and that’s what makes us, us.” Price added, “But actually, Ethan rallies the troops, and he’s the one that really brings a song together. “And stops the rest of the band from killing each other!” Brenner said. Although they all beat on each other, it just shows how well they know one another, and how close they are as both as friends and band-mates. With sudden realization on his face, Price added, “Oh and Jake? There’s not much to say, I mean, Jake’s just a drummer.” The three of them erupted in laughter. Although their personalities often conflict in practice, being so close forces them to be
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supportive. “Someone might be having a bad day, and we’ll just give them space or talk to them,” Price said. “But sometimes we just need to pull them aside and ask them to focus more or play better. It sounds harsh but we’re all used to it.” The band practices anywhere from one to three times a week, according to how close their next show is. Lately,
The band rocks out at Multnomah Days.
they have been recording as well, hoping to get as many songs out as possible by senior year. “We don’t know where we’re all going to go to college,” Perris said. “I’d like to say we’re all going to stick through and somehow keep going, but chances are we’ll go to different colleges. It sucks, but it’s been a good run, and we still have a year to go.” As of now, Surviving Yesterday has three songs out: “Facebook Song”, “Nice Girl”, and “With You”. All three are on the band’s Facebook page as well as their Soundcloud. “But those aren’t even our best work.” Price said, “Even since like August and June when we recorded, we keep getting better. We have 11 songs now, and the newest ones, which are the best, we haven’t even played in
No. 5 front of anyone yet.” The band writes and plays their own music, each musician writing their own pieces. “Even though we all come up with our own parts, Ethan will come up with the whole basis of a song,” Perris said. This can cause arguments over which parts go with a song, but it also helps them learn about each other as musicians and helps with the bonding of the band and the homemade feel of their sound as a whole. At their shows, of which they’ve had ten, they play the three songs they’ve recorded, along with a set of covers of some of their favorite songs, ranging from grunge to post-grunge to rock to punk rock. “We play a lot of songs from bands that influence us, like Foo Fighters, Blink 182, Artic Monkeys, and Green Day. They’re the bands we started covering and we still do today.” Price said. Their largest show to date was at the Roseland Theater, where they played in front of around 250 people. “I’ll admit, it was kind of scary,” Perris said. “But we’ve been getting better about that. We used to
all get nervous before shows, but now we’re all super stoked. We’re more confident about our music now, and any nervousness before the show turns into excitement when were on stage. We love playing music, and we love playing it for people.” It also helps that the band now has a pre-show ritual, where they all gather back-
contacted to play shows. “Reverb Nation is a great site for us, whoever thought of putting our band on there was really smart,” Price said, pointing to himself. Besides Reverb Nation, the band also gets contacted by the local community, which is how they get the opportunity to play Multnomah Days. They were also recently contacted by a music company called Giberland Music, who invited them to play club gigs in both Portland and Seattle. As the band practices every week, and records more and more, they have no doubt that they’re about to surface. It’s the classic dream of a garage band sprinkled with strong bonds and success. With multiple up-coming gigs to practice for and play, Surviving Yesterday has their work cut out for them, but they couldn’t be happier about it.
“We love playing music, and we love playing it for people.” stage and tell each other that they’re going rock the show. Their most recent show was very special to them, as it was their first show out of town. They played at a venue called Studio Seven in Seattle, in front of about 100 people. “We get contacted a lot due to people seeing our Reverb Nation page,” Perris said. Reverb Nation is a website where up-andcoming artists can put up their music, tell about themselves, connect with fans, and, like in Surviving Yesterday’s case, get
Jamie Valentine Junior Photos contributed by Ethan Brenner Thoughts? Tweet @WHSTrojanHorse
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IDENTITY
ONE WILSON STUDENT’S STRUGGLE TO FIND HIMSELF
Eli Morgan-Steiner walked into the Starbucks coffee shop with his hands in his pockets and a slightly slouched gait. He sat in the small brown chair, legs squared, clothed in a yellow jacket and sporting short, newly electric red hair. Some people wouldn’t think twice about it, but for those who knew Morgan-Steiner for a while, something big had changed. Morgan-Steiner, a senior at Wilson, transitioned from Libby to Eli just this past summer. As he talked about his transition, his eyes darted up and down. “I prefer, just, blanket-statement queer, because it’s easier explaining everything,” Morgan-Steiner said, talking with his hands. “Queer is just the easiest word to identify it because it’s not exactly one or the other, and it gives more
ever said it out loud that I was not cis-gender [an individual who has a match between the gender they were assigned at birth and the roles and behaviors considered by society to be appropriate to their particular sex], and they were just really supportive there.” One of the constant sources of support in Morgan Steiner’s life has been his friends. They have been there throughout the process and have helped him through it. “It wasn’t terribly surprising,” Chris Meabe, Morgan-Steiner’s friend, said. “He had told me before that he was kind of trying to figure his gender identity out. It wasn’t anything particularly new, he just found an identity that fit him.” Another one of Morgan-Steiner’s friends, Ashlynne Olsen, has been supportive throughout the transition as well. “He requested that we start using gender neutral terms, and then he ultimately decided on male pronouns over winter break,” Olsen said. “It wasn’t shocking, it was just something new.” Morgan-Steiner has also found support in his parents. While many parents react negatively to the news, Morgan-Steiner’s parents didn’t. “My parents try their hardest to understand, but sometimes they don’t totally get things, and sometimes they slip up,” Morgan-Steiner said. “But that’s totally normal. They’re trying and that’s what counts.”
“My parents try their hardest to understand, but sometimes they slip up. But that’s totally normal.”
freedom.” According to Human Rights Campaign, “the term ‘transitioning’ refers to the process through which a person modifies his or her physical characteristics and/or manner of gender expression to be consistent with his or her gender identity”. There are many factors that go into transitioning, including a change in dress, name, and mannerisms. All of these changes require the help and support from those around the person transitioning. Support is one of the most important elements in a person’s life, and this is especially so for someone who is transitioning. “I haven’t run into anybody who hasn’t been totally supportive, and I’m really lucky in that,” Morgan-Steiner said. “At my job was the first place I
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May 2014 It was a surprise to Morgan-Steiner’s mother, Barbara Morgan, when he told her that he was not cis-gender, but Morgan and her family accepted it immediately. “I believe all people have the right to be taken on their own terms, so as a family, we honored his request for a change in name and pronoun and the other gender-related terms as soon as he made them,” Morgan said. Although he received nothing but support from his friends and family, Morgan-Steiner still had many fears before his transition. “You look online to find something to identify with, and of course the worst stories are always the ones that come up on the first page of Google,” Morgan-Steiner said. A quick Google search brings up stories of kids getting kicked out of their houses and bullied relentlessly for their gender identity. Morgan-Steiner has not run into any major problems since his transition, believing this is because he does his best to stay out of gendered spaces. “I plan on doing it as much as possible, but honestly, that has more to do with my personal beliefs that they aren’t as necessary as people want them to be.” Morgan-Steiner realized he was not cis-gender a few years prior to his transition, but he never
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really let himself think about it too seriously until last year. “It was just a couple weeks after school got out when I first ever said it,” Morgan-Steiner said. His day-to-day life hasn’t changed much, in his opinion. “The biggest change has been how I feel as a whole, which involves a higher self-esteem.” Like Morgan-Steiner, most people take some time to fully begin the transitioning process. “People tend to think it’s just that you wake up one morning and it’s like, ‘Oops, guess I’m transgender now!’ when it’s really not,” Morgan-Steiner said. It’s a transition that takes time and courage. It may take days, weeks, months, or even years for someone to finally begin to transition. For Morgan-Steiner, it was strange at first. For a long time he wouldn’t even let himself consider it an option, but he finally started letting himself think that way. “When you don’t know someone, or you yourself aren’t a part of any one subset of humanity, it’s kind of hard to think about it as a concrete thing,” Morgan-Steiner said. “It was kind of weird because this thing that I had only been thinking of in a conceptual way was now an actual reality.”
No. 5 For a while, Morgan-Steiner considered himself “gender fluid”. Gender fluid means a fluctuation of gender identity, feeling like a girl one day and then feeling like a guy another. “After time progressed, my gender solidified, so gender fluid doesn’t quite work anymore, because I never feel like a girl,” Morgan-Steiner said. After finally settling on his gender identity, one of the recurring issues was people using his old name. “My policy is that as long as you’re trying and not intentionally mis-gendering me, I’m not going to get mad.” Morgan-Steiner believes that using gendered language can be harmful and can create tension within transgender people and people who are questioning. Another issue that comes up a lot is the bathroom situation: which do transgender people use? “There’s a lot more that I have to think about than I would have otherwise. When I’m in places that have bathrooms separated by gender, I have to decide do I look manly enough today to get away with going in the male bathroom, or do I look too male to use the girl’s bathroom?” Meabe talked with the administration about designating a unisex bathroom at Wilson for transgender students. “A lot of the time, if someone like Eli walks into the bathrooms, he might get a negative reaction,” Meabe said. This installation helps create a positive and comfortable atmosphere for the student body as a whole. At Grant High School last year, important changes were made so that they now have six
single-stall unisex bathrooms. This year at Wilson, one unisex bathroom was made available to the student body near the front office, a great addition especially for transgender students. No key needed, the bathroom locks from the inside so anyone can feel safe while using the restroom. “Before that was set up, I used the boys bathroom,” Morgan-Steiner said. “That being said, I also used the bathroom as infrequently as I could.” According to Morgan-Steiner, other than a few new pairs of men’s jeans and the new name “Eli”, he hasn’t changed who he is as a whole: his outside appearance just matches the way he feels on the inside now. His advice to others: “It’s okay to not know. It’s okay to be totally sure and be terrified. Talking to somebody is the best way to work it out. It’s just okay.”
Adrianne Nix Junior
Natalie Jenkins Junior Photos by Tana Kelley Thoughts? Tweet @WHSTrojanHorse
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May 2014
Wilson’s Water
THE MAN BEHIND THE MAGIC
Every day, streams of brown particulates flow out of the drinking fountain and into the mouths of Wilson High School students. “It tasted like rocks. If rocks had a taste, it was that water, and that’s not normal,” senior Kathrine Kayrouz said. “It can’t be good for you.” Clean water is essential for healthy living, but at Wilson High School rust and particulates in the pipes contaminate the water, leaving students who regularly refill a water bottle at school staring at a brownish cloud. This leaves people wondering, why should students be subjected to rust-filled water? PPS environmental and water safety workers have tried to address the rust and lead issue by installing filters in some of the water fountains, but even this isn’t a perfect solution. The main problem with the filtered water
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fountains is the time that it takes. “If I do drink the water, it’s in the fountain, the one you put your water bottle under for 20 minutes,” Kayrouz said. “It’s so slow. The one at Benson was better.” Why does appealing drinking water at school matter? Health authorities commonly say that we need eight 8-ounce glasses per day or about 2 liters. Hydration is an important part of being healthy. “As little as a 2% decrease in body water can lead to dehydration and performance detriments in sports,” Larry Kenney, PhD, professor of physiology and kinesiology at Penn State said. “When your water levels decrease by higher levels like 3% or 4%, there are physiological changes that occur that may have health consequences, such as increased heart rate and body temperature.” (http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/features/quest-for-hydration)
No. 5 Conscience of the importance of staying hydrated, athletes such as Yonus Hammer and Mikaela Bessette normally get their water elsewhere. If they drink the school’s water, it’s usually from the filtered water fountains like the one by the gym or next to the weightlifting room. Although Hammer will drink from those two water fountains, the other ones are a no-go. He said that he would rather pay two dollars on a vending machine water bottle than go to any of the other water fountains. Junior Liam Pulliam agreed. “I normally just get water out of the vending machine,” he said. Not the most cost-effective option. According to Principal Brian Chatard, it could be worse. “We didn’t drink out of the drinking fountains at Grant High School,” he said. Though Wilson might have it better than Grant, it is apparently worse than Benson, leaving the quality of the school’s drinking water a contentious issue. Access to appetizing water is especially essential for student success. It affects a lot of things such as the ability to retain information, concentrate for long periods of time, and lower stress-levels. Clean appetizing water also increases the likelihood that students will be more hydrated for whatever they may do after school. (http://www. examiner.com/article/the-importance-of-drinking-water-2).
At this time, Chatard does not see the water quality as a safety issue, but is willing to listen to arguments to the contrary. If any pupil were to talk to Brian Chatard about the safety of the water, he’d listen. “If you were telling me as a student that the water is disgusting and I should do something about it, I would immediately communicate that to my custodian and say can you move this up the chain so somebody can come out and look at the water,” he said. This would most likely be unnecessary since there are already people monitoring the quality of drinking water across PPS, where the pipes at some schools are even older than those at Wilson. Patrick Wolfe, manager of environmental safety, said that the main problem with fixing the pipes for better water is that the cost of the whole endeavor is huge. That’s why they put filters on the fountains so that they can avoid the massive cost of repairs. “Two million was spent on Benson as part of a bond in 1996. The pipes were falling apart and it wasn’t even the entire building,” Wolfe said. “When we originally tested, we replaced the fixture on any fountain that tested high on the first draw with a fixture made with very little lead (there is no “no-lead” fixture). If the fountain was high on the second draw, we added a filter to
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May 2014 take the lead out of the water in the pipes behind the fountain. If both first and second draws tested low, we left it alone. That’s why some fountains have several tests (look at the dates) – we tested after replacement because we wanted to make sure that we’d removed the lead from the water.” Wolfe explains that if water is running slow, it is most likely because the pipes are plugged and that is due to the age of the pipes. “The regular filters (in the blue plastic case) generally last a year before they accumulate enough sediment to be noticeable,” he said. “We usually change them in the summer. The Elkay coolers have filters that are changed three times a year, as they plug quicker.” Despite these tests and fixes, students still complain about the cloudy quality of the water from the water fountains. “It was literally black. We put it in one of those regular plastic water bottles and it was black,” senior Paige Zizzi said. “It tasted like charcoal.” Her friend Kathrine Kayrouz agreed. “It’s one of those things that just should be fixed,” she said, “It should be the number one thing.” Chatard believes the water, at worst, is bad looking. “It isn’t necessarily tasty, but it probably isn’t dangerous,” Chatard said. “What you’re getting is the particulate from old pipes basically.” Pulliam agrees. “I just think its gross water,” he
said “I don’t think its life threatening, but I don’t think it’s good either.” Both Chatard and Pulliam are on the right track, but to know more, you need to understand what the particulates are. “The milky part is just air,” science teacher Mr. Duchow-Presley said. “If you fill up a bottle with that milky water and let it sit for a few minutes, it will be clear.” Mr. Duchow-Presley knows that the other brown stuff that comes from the fountains is just rust, and said that even if it’s rusty water, it wouldn’t really be bad for you. As a person who drinks the water at Wilson every day, Mr. Duchow-Presley thinks that there is no benefit for the cost. “What just needs to happen is a routine flushing of the pipes once in a while,” he said. “The problem is that there is nobody to do that.” In the meantime, his advice is to just let the water run. In response to the water problem, WSU (Wilson Student Union) has devised their newest project, H2GO. Their plan is to raise enough money to replace the pipes in the school. Although no action has been taken yet, the president of the WSU, junior Andries Menger, said that once they are done with their current project, they are going to fully invest in H2GO. Menger plans to team up with Leadership to fundraise this project even though he believes
“It was literally black. We put it in one of those regular plastic water bottles and it was black,”
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No. 5 that the administration has the money. “As the administration of PPS happens to have a lot of money at this moment, I feel like it is their choice of what to spend that money on,” Menger said. Whether or not that is the case, one thing is certain, free water does not mean good water. And until something is done about it, students are left with five options when at school: bring
water from home, pay for bottled water out of the vending machines, go thirsty, miss a couple of minutes of class as they wait for the filtered water, or accept rust as a normal part of their drinking experience.
Tana Kelley Junior Photos by Tana Kelley Thoughts? Tweet @WHSTrojanHorse
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May 2014
@WHSTrojanHorse Front cover: Lead singer Seth Greenberg and bassist Ethan Brenner from Surviving Yesterday. Back cover: Ellen Whatmore travelling with friend. Photos contributed by Ellen Whatmore & Jason Gaskill
back cover
LEGAL Local Civil Rights inquiries Brian Chatard, Title VI, IX Coordinator (503) 916-5280 Maude Lamont, 504 Coordinator (503) 916-5280 District Title vi, ix, & 504 inquiries Carolyn Leonard, Compliance (503) 916-5280 Room 227 - BESC American Disabilities Act Contact Maureen Sloan, HR Legal Counsel (503) 916-3025 Human Resources - BESC
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