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Students at C.K. McClatchy have noticed a problem occuring in women’s restrooms this year: there are empty menstrual product dispensers all around the school.
It was unclear to students why they were empty or where they came from, but some students have found it frustrating.
“I think it’s very improper of them to have it empty,” said Edith Olvera (‘19).
The dispensers were installed by SCUSD in every women’s bathroom in the district.
“Unfortunately, when they were installed the keys were not provided to any staff members,” said Assistant Principal Iyuanna Pease. “We have the supplies to fill the dispenser and working to get them added.”
Ms. Pease added that while administration works on getting the key from the District, students can obtain feminine hygiene products from the Student Support Center in the counseling hall.
The Sacramento City Unified School District has made all AP tests in 2019 free for its students.
The District will be paying for all AP tests using the money from the College Readiness Grant. According to The Sacramento City Unified School District’s official website, “Using funds from the College Readiness Block Grant set to expire this year, this opportunity will come at no cost to any Sacramento City Unified family.”
Normally, all students who are registered to take AP tests in May have to pay $94 for each test, with the exception of reductions for those of low income.
The emergence of this grant coincides with Collegeboard’s decision to create online communities for AP classes. Students “enroll” in their AP classes through the website and are automatically registered for the corresponding AP tests.
Students in AP classes who do not wish to take part in AP testing are required to fill out a form in the front office in order to opt out of the test.
The Sacramento City Unified School District wants to further increase the number of opportunities available to their students in order to prepare them well enough for college.
Students who participate in AP classes and take the AP exams are more likely to graduate from college, qualify for scholarships, and help with college applications as well according to SCUSD’s official website.
The Greater Sacramento NAACP held a town hall meeting in McClatchy’s auditorium on Wednesday, September 12th to discuss a recent scientific report which found that African American boys were being suspended at alarmingly disproportionate rates compared to other students.
Several speakers spoke at the event. First, Principal Peter Lambert gave an opening speech in which he expressed concern over the suspension rates, and promised to “make sure that all students can be successful who walk through our doors.”
He was followed by SCUSD Superintendent Jorge Aguilar, who expressed similar concern with the issue, saying that race issues are “something we have avoided talking about for too long.”
Then, Betty Williams, president of the Greater Sacramento NAACP, talked about some of the research that had been done on the suspension disparity. She noted that, while suspensions have gone down in recent years, the disparity is still huge and there is still much that needs to be done. She then introduced Dr. Tyrone C. Howard and Dr. Luke Wood, two of the authors of the suspension report. They have worked with Black Minds Matter and the Black Male Institute to research the ways in which African American students, especially boys, receive far more punishments than whites.
A large chunk of the event was devoted to Dr. Howard and Dr. Wood giving a slide show presentation. This presentation was filled with charts, statistics, and anecdotes showing just how big this problem is.
For example, the overall suspension rate in California is 3.6%. However, for black males in California, it is 12.8%. For black males in Sacramento County, it is 19.5%.
The presentation talked about how this heightened risk of suspensions, expulsions, and other punishments can have negative effects on black students, leading to a “greater risk of dropping out,” a lower chance of going to college, limited career mobility, and “increased involvement with the criminal justice system.”
The doctors noted that while the majority of their research had been devoted to the situation of black males, black females were going through similar struggles.
They also discussed implicit bias, which they said was one of the largest contributors to this issue. The speakers defined implicit bias as being when people make stereotype-based assumptions about people without realizing it. They asserted that people in high-stress jobs who have to make decisions based on incomplete information, like police officers and teachers, are especially vulnerable to implicit bias.
After the slide show, there were a few more speakers, as well as a question and answer panel made up of Superintendent Aguilar, Drs Wood and Howard, and Jessie Ryan, President of the SCUSD Board of Directors.
Aguilar said during this section that his administration’s focus will be on “changing mindsets,” and that “we are not going to let financial issues get in the way of student’s needs.”
The Mansion Inn has lay abandoned and empty for the past decade. That all changed this summer when creator Marisa Kolokotronis, a St. Francis alumni, executed her idea to showcase an immersive visual and performing arts exhibit and festival on the hotel’s barren walls before the hotel gets torn down and a new one takes its place.
Tearing Walls Apart began in early August with an application process, but Kolokotronis said her plan began last November and took months to put to put together. She did so with the help of many local sponsors, like Leave Your Mark Sacramento, The Grupe Company, and SKK Developments.
The show was available to all students in the County of Sacramento. It appealed to Sacramentan artists of all shapes, sizes, and mediums. Each team, of up to six members, was assigned to a room and had total creative control of the room and could decorate it any way they pleased as long as it coincided with the overarching theme of unity.
My experience in Tearing Walls Apart consisted of months of preparations and planning with my team. My team, Blake Aboueljoud (‘21), Mackenzie Crall (‘20), Michael Alongi (‘21), Carenna Thompson (‘21) and myself came up with the idea for our piece to be centered around sexual assault awareness. We were able to do so with the help of the wonderful Mrs. Morrison, McClatchy’s 3D Art teacher. She was an inspiring asset, and helpful mentor to our group.
Last year, the surfacing of new information in the rape case of a student here at C.K.M. sparked a student-led walkout devoted to coming together and giving administration the message that the way the case was dealt with can never happen again. We shared our stories and experiences and grew closer together as a school. Because of these events, we wanted to dedicate our piece to sexual assault awareness and acknowledge where our school went wrong, and that we, as the student body, won’t make the same mistakes in the future.
The piece itself was a room painted entirely black with white intersecting lines spread out on both the walls and the floor, with a figure composed entirely out of tape in the center of the room. The figure, known to our group as Tape Cole II, named after the model, was shaped in a very closed-off and curled up position, with only an arm reaching out. All over the four walls, set in the intersections of the white lines, were tape hands, all extended out towards the tape figure. The tape hands represented support systems and how even in our hardest times, we still have people that love and are there for us.
The room only took about a day and a half to assemble, as we had been working on the hands and figure for months prior to the event. Each hand was constructed by wrapping tape around our hands with the sticky side facing upwards, followed by layers upon layers of tape, and then removed from our hands by cutting it off and taping together to cut pieces. To make the figure, we used a willing volunteer to spend hours in a morph suit, the one and only Cole Eames (‘20), and wrapped him in layers of tape.
On Sunday, September 23rd, the Tearing Walls Apart Festival consisted of numerous live performances, including our own Carenna Thompson, who closed out the festival with a few of her original songs accompanied by acoustic guitar. At the award ceremony, our group received the award for “Most Creative Use of Materials.”
We were very honored to be apart of such an inclusive program, with creative artists and students like ourselves. Tearing Walls Apart was truly a unifying experience for creative students all around Sacramento, and helped us all come together and truly tear walls apart for the sake of art.
This article contains spoilers for the novel After.
Books have an array of serious topics that they discuss about in the stories that they tell. Normally, they would give information about the issue and spread awareness instead of glorifying it. Writing on serious topics like abusive relationships or families, suicide, and racism have been written into fictional books forever, but typically the author would write it in respectively.
After is a fictional novel written by Anna Todd. The book started out as a Harry Styles fanfiction. It got published into print sometime in 2014 after it became a hit on the website Wattpad. To summarize: it’s about a sweet girl named Tessa that meets a bad boy named Hardin. They fall in love, with complications along the way.
To say that Hardin is an abusive boyfriend in the novel is an understatement. He won’t talk to her, gets angry with her when she talks to her male friends, and always becomes affectionate after, as if he didn’t do that. He threatened to burn the house down while she was in it, but excused this behavior by his messed up childhood. He humiliated her by making a bet with people that involved messing with her feelings about him and lying that he wanted to be with her before they actually got together. There were times that he almost hit her and made her feel scared of him.
These instances should be a potential learning moment for the reader and show the progression of her doing what is healthy for her, maybe even having his character develop and learn from his mistake of letting out his repressed emotions on her, but instead it progressed into Tessa making excuses for him and reasons to stay with him. The book shows his possessive actions as if it’s attractive to have a man act that way.
A lot of arguments that I have been given from After fans about Hardin’s abusive behavior is that “he doesn’t know any better” and “he had a bad childhood that made him this way.” Those arguments are the same arguments given from society to excuse the behavior of abusers. He should know better—that’s the issue. Yes, he may have had a childhood that made him the messed up, mysterious person he is, but that will not and cannot excuse his behavior towards someone he “loves.” He is not a child that doesn’t quite grasp the idea of morals and not being aggressive to the people he claims to love; he is a grown adult. Hardin is written as 24 years old. The claim “he doesn’t know any better” shouldn’t even be said considering at the age of 24 years old, you are an adult that should know these kinds of things.
A survivor of an emotionally and/or physically abusive relationship could see this as a trigger. Seeing something traumatic that has happened to them be written as something to be seen as attractive in a significant other probably feels terrible.
Even if this is fiction, that doesn’t excuse the impression it can make on young minds. I have been told by people that they are nervous to say “I love you too” because of a scene in the book where Tessa says that and Hardin tells her she shouldn’t because it seems like she’s agreeing that he loves her. These people were 13 at the time of reading this once fanfiction. They were young and impressionable, and definitely gullible enough to believe what an abusive man thought about the words coming out of a woman’s mouth.
This behavior is written in plenty of books and movies: a man being overly protective and aggressive toward the woman he is with. It is typical for this to be seen as attractive due to the the book or movie portrays it. After takes the cake for this. If you want to write about abuse in any relationship, make sure you don’t come off as making it attractive, and give insight to what abuse in relationships is actually like.
I’ll start off by saying it’s very difficult for me to offer this movie any praise. Its debut comes just behind the more critically successful To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, the Netflix movie starring Noah Centineo and Lana Condor.I expected significantly more than the sewage I forced myself to watch for two unrelenting hours. After all, Netflix has been on the rise for reviving old and exhausted teen tropes in refreshingly bold and youthful romantic comedies, the most noteworthy being To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, but Sierra Burgess Is A Loser falls utterly short.
The movie stars Shannon Purser, a memorable face from Netflix’s Stranger Things, as Sierra Burgess. She is the unconventionally confident underdog heroine who, in an attempt to win over the dreamboat jock Jamey, becomes unlikely friends with picture-perfect Veronica, the school’s popular girl.
I could point out the shaky filming and the gross sepia filter. I could talk about the atrocious acting, the anticlimactic and purely nonexistent romantic premise, the lousy and random subplots that begin and end nowhere. I could go off on the unending, unrealistic cliches, the consistently disappointing dialogue, the vague allusions to random motifs that inevitably mean nothing to the characters. All of these aspects alone could accurately encompass my feelings for the movie, without me even needing to mention that the entire plot is centered around a psychotic catfishing scandal on which the main friendship, romantic intrigue, and character development is also built on, and consequently shattered.
I don’t understand what is so magnetizing about any part of Purser’s character. Sure, she is relatable in that she’s confident but not cocky, and self-conscious without being terribly insecure. I can see how the audience could be drawn that awkward but somewhat quirky charm, but once I get past the general acceptance that this was how Sierra Burgess was going to be, I can’t take it any further and convince myself she is still worth my attention after her actions in the rest of the movie.
While Jamey had genuinely convinced himself he was falling in love with Veronica, Sierra is unnervingly happy using her, as her newly-appointed best friend, to toy with his feelings and hide who she actually is behind false pretense.
The movie even takes it so far as to see Veronica switch places with Sierra just as Jamey is about to kiss her; gross in context, gross in reality, and even worse seeing Sierra walk away from it smiling and feeling incredible about herself, while Veronica is back in her place as Sierra’s pawn in front of Jamey. The whole thing, in one word, is wrong.
I’m concerned and, to say the least, disturbed with Sierra’s character development. It’s unnerving how she’s okay with everything she’s done and can live her life like this; she’s okay with catfishing the boy she likes, playing with him and his emotions, using her friend and justifying it all with alleged but undetectable insecurities.
Finally, Sierra delivers a severely low blow that is the perfect validation to top off my ever widening hatred for her character. After seeing Jamey kiss Veronica, Sierra puts Veronica’s humiliating online break-up on blast in front of the whole school at a football game. After this, it was hard for me to feel bad for her.
The fact that Sierra treated her friend like this, even though it’s ridiculous, and then expected to be forgiven for the mess she made with a temper tantrum and subpar song about sunflowers, honestly made me want to flip a table.
I wanted a plot I could be drawn into. I wanted an opening scene that would steal my breath or make me double over in laughter. I wanted a character that I could love, hate, or love to hate. I at least wanting decent cinematography that didn’t make me feel like I was reliving a migraine. I found almost none of this in Sierra Burgess is a Loser.
Instead, I found a tiring plot, a mundane opening, flimsy cinematography—a movie that had nothing going for it at all. I hate Sierra Burgess, and I hate the fact that I hate her because I hate that I took time out of my day to watch this movie in the first place.
This 40-minute, dreamy alternative rock playlist is perfect for any and all moods. Whether you are commuting to school, participating in after school activities, or simply lying on your bed after a stressful day at school, this playlist will help you cope with life as a teenager. Some will help you get through your homework, and others will get you dancing. This playlist has a variety of moods, including upbeat anthems by Grouplove and The Strokes, the somber tune by Twin Peaks, and the melodious harmonies presented by Whitney and Tame Impala. These songs have light undertones that will help you get through the fall semester.
As August 27 finally rolled around and summer ground to a halt, juniors and seniors idly checked their student accounts for what would either be their third or fourth year going into C.K.M, while freshmen and sophomores nervously logged in to see what would become of their fate.
Everyone expected to see what they were supposed to: a clean and crisp page on Infinite Campus of their six or seven classes, labeled in all caps with the teachers names running along the bottom, as the final days of summer went abuzz with who had which teacher, which class, which students and which period. But instead, there were blank spaces, doubled classes, missing requirements, and a school of almost three thousand bewildered students.
On the first day of school, kids filed into the counselors office throughout the day, claiming to not be enrolled in a class that particular period. Teachers took roll and called out almost fifty names off their roster. There are standstill lines leading into the science quad, leaving students asking, “What happened this year?”
There are a number of things that are off-putting to students about the scheduling situation. One is that there are significantly more students on campus that last year or the year before, which is clear to anyone who has dared endure passing period going through the connecting stairway beside the bike cage.
Another is the amount of students that are missing classes, the majority missing their science, art, or math class. Either the schedules were made with having left them out, or there is a hole, or empty period, where the class should be and the student has nothing enrolled for that period.
Of course, as Ms. Cunningham, one of McClatchy’s counselors, said, the counselors did their best to prioritize the most important classes a student needs and requested before considering what else could be included in the basic six class structure. But not everything could be done nicely and neatly, especially with the couple hundred extra students that seem to have suddenly materialized on campus, surprising both students and admin.
From a student’s standpoint, the student distribution per class per period looks oddly out of balance. With some classes, up to fifty students are crammed in outer edge seats and up against the walls. Other classes are nearly half their usual size, with space taken up by empty desks.
Ms. Jordan, C.K.M.’s registrar, listed a number of factors she considered to be the main forces that drove the schedule process to overturn. One of these is obviously the increase of bodies on campus, especially of incoming ninth graders. She said that compared to the sophomore, junior, and senior class sizes, the freshman class took the prize with having nearly 720 students enrolled for the 2018 school year.
“That’s crazy,” she said. “Especially when you look at the other numbers where it’s a little over six for tenth, then a little over five, trickling down…that’s nearly one hundred more for the start of ninth grade.”
How does McClatchy happen to accept one hundred students over their limit? Enrollment happens at the enrollment center, not at the school.
“The enrollments are typically done at the enrollment center, so it’s not like McClatchy is just taking kids in,” says Ms.Jordan. “The enrollment center should balance it out…but if you literally live in this area, we legally have to enroll you. If you are in McClatchy’s attendance area, we just have to.”
That explains the extra one hundred students. But shouldn’t that mean each class be filled?
Another of these reasons was personal inquiries for particular classes. Certain classes, said Cunningham, were highly requested, which made it difficult to incorporate into schedules. Classes like AP Bio, Computer Science, and 2D Art were hard to work around because of conflictions with basic classes like English and History, which are often clumped together.
In building the schedules, the counsellors have a process. For the students in exclusive programs such as LPPA, or HISP, their options are somewhat limited for which classes can be taken. These programs have certain classes that are only offered during specific periods (for example, HISP english and history classes are only offered during 3rd and 4th period). From there, the counsellors determine when science, math, language classes, and electives, can fit into a student’s schedule.
According to Cunningham, 300 students requested ceramics this year, but there is only room for 175 students over the span of five periods. A large portion of these students are only available to take the class during certain periods, due to their programs. This leads to overbooked classes.
The elimination process is not random, but it is slow. Counsellors call in students who have already met their art requirements so that they can choose another class, without having a class forced upon them. Counselors also call in students who have a hole in their schedule, so that they have the option to choose which class they would like to take.
The primary goal for counsellors is for students to meet their graduation requirements early on, before taking any extra electives. When selecting schedules for the following year, counselors highly encourage students to “stick to what they pick” as Cunningham put it. Many students try to fix their schedules early on in the year, because they decided that the class they initially chose is too difficult, too easy, or they’ve lost interest. This puts more on the counsellors plate as they have more pressing demands, such as maxed out classes, and holes in students’ schedules.
Cunningham wishes that more teachers could be hired, as an easy solution to these oversized classes, but Principal Lambert has a strict budget as to how many teachers can be hired.
Now comes the question, “Is this expected to become a trend at McClatchy?” Of course, there will always be conflicts with required classes and elective classes and students with changed minds regarding what classes they want to take. According to Jordan, the school has always balanced out classes and fixed schedules by September 15th, the district deadline.
The number of incoming freshmen this year was astonishing to the counsellors, and it is undetermined if it will happen again. Most of these freshmen however did not end up actually attending McClatchy, and so if the numbers are the same, then most likely will be the number of attending students. It will simply be a matter of trying to determine who transferred schools, and who is staying at their home school.
As of September 7th, the 717 freshmen enrolled at McClatchy dramatically dropped to 650. The holes in schedules are being filled, extra classes are being removed, and graduation requirements are being met. The counsellors are working hard to ensure that the students at McClatchy have the educational experience that they deserve.
