The Blue and Gold maldenblueandgold.com Malden High School
Volume 105 Edition 4
77 salem street
February 2020
Trump’s Impeachment Ana Pirosca Editor-in-Chief Carlos Aragon Aldana Lead Reporter
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VAPING, GRAFFITI CLOSES BATHROOMS Sabrina Monteiro Managing Editor of Web Vanessa Saintvil Lead Reporter
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short while after coming back from summer vacation in 2019, the Principal of Malden High School, Chris Mastrangelo, had come to the conclusion that a majority of the bathrooms needed to be locked. There has been an ongoing problem with students skipping class. The situation at hand seems to be that many students are not using bathrooms in the way that they should be and are instead, being used for graffiti writing and vaping. Mastrangelo mentioned that these were already issues in previous years but that this year in particular, it has gotten worse. He explained that the administration is “looking into other solutions so [they] can get the bathrooms reopened but the quickest thing [they] could do was decrease the number of bathrooms [they] had to monitor.” This change, however, has caused some frustration within the
student body. It has been proven especially difficult for students who use the bathroom appropriately since it interferes with class time that is taken from them when they have to take twice as long to look for an open bathroom. It has also been worse in terms of waiting in lines to use the bathroom. So even if students find the bathroom quickly, they are stuck in a crowded area waiting on others. Senior Rodge-Neima Joseph is one of many students who are angered by the situation. She explained that she did not understand what was happening at first and although she began to afterwards, she still finds it frustrating. She expressed that “it is like a maze run for no reason. People are still vaping in the bathrooms and [locking them] is not solving the problem. It just makes it harder for people trying to be good students.” Joseph also said that “it was for a good cause but [they] did not think of all the consequences.” Mastrangelo and the administrative team are doing their best to resolve the issue and Mastrangelo even shared that the
“complaints are legitimate and quite frankly, [he does not] disagree with them which is why [they are] trying to come up with other solutions.” In addition, he also thinks “[they] need to figure some ways out to be more respectful of [the] school.” The school has hired another building monitor and plans on hiring one more. Nothing is set and stone yet but other solutions include recruiting staff to have bathroom duty instead of studies, adding more cameras with different angles (third and fourth floor in Holland building), and for the boys bathroom specifically, the thought of keeping the doors opened has crossed their minds, since there is a wall right when you walk in. Mastrangelo can not stress it enough that these are “things that [he does not] want to do, things that [they have] never had to do. Students have been respectful but things have changed. Continued on page 7
n December 18th, the House of Representatives voted to proceed with the impeachment of President Donald Trump based on two articles on impeachment claiming abuse of power and obstruction of congressional inquiry. On February 5th, the President was acquitted for both articles by the Senate. Here is what that means: When Trump was first elected as president, his inauguration, like all presidents, entailed an oath swearing that he “will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States” and “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Like only two other presidents to become impeached (Johnson and Clinton—Nixon left office before he was impeached), the articles of impeachment detail that Trump should be charged with “high crimes and misdemeanors,” or simply, a violation of the oath when he took office. This is important because the role of the president is to work in the benefit of the nation, and while many argue that his presidency brought much for the economy and more, the House still holds the actions of the president into account, especially when those actions do not benefit the nation. There are a large number of people who do not agree with the presidency of Trump since the beginning. To date, Trump is projected to have a 42.5% approval rate by adults and potential voters alike, becoming one of the least popular presidents in modern history. Many of these people believe that Trump’s tactics regarding the 2016 election, the upcoming election, and the Ukrainian government have not been wholly fair, transcending into the articles that were served to the Senate in 2019. In layman’s terms, the first article stated that he used his position of power to ask the Ukranian government to announce investigations that would help him get re-elected and hurt other candidate’s chances. This was initially seen during his first campaign for president, launching an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails in which Clinton sent highly confidential emails over an unsecured private server—highly dangerous for a person in her position at the time. Continued on page 6