Manhattan High students deck out in red, white and blue for the second football game of the year. The team was cheered on to their 49-21 win over Seaman Friday night. PHOTO BY LAUREN RACE
READ MORE ON PAGE 4.
Volume 103 // Issue 2 // Sept. 15, 2015
the mentor
School reacts to bomb threat Science Olympiad move past loss of class MADELINE MARSHALL
Print Editor-in-Chief
Yesterday at approximately 9:30 a.m. a student found a potential bomb threat on a bathroom wall at Manhattan High West campus. The message was very vague, saying something about a bomb going off at noon. “A student reported to a teacher that there was a message written on a wall in the boys bathroom,” Principal Greg Hoyt said. “That teacher informed one of the assistant principals and that assistant principal alerted me and Officer [Jamie] Douglas.” The threat was determined to be minimalShortly after, an unauthorized individual was granted access to the building by a student at approximately 11:10 a.m. School staff were
made aware of this during first lunch and approximately five minutes later the individual was located, questioned and escorted from the premises by law enforcement. Hoyt hopes that these happenings will help remind those at MHS to be alert and stick together. “It's incumbent upon all adults and students in the building to just constantly be alert,” Hoyt said. “We're all in this thing together and we have the responsibility to try and keep each other safe. It's a good time for us to pause and learn and reflect and think. I want students to know that if they think that they can play around this way, it's not a good way to play around and if we find you there will be discipline applied.”
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced its 16,000 semifinalists last Wednesday. The list included Manhattan High seniors Spencer Parish, Cathy Lei, Joshua Schwartz and Nathan McClendon. Check out WWW.MHSMENTOR.COM for the story
TRACY LE
News Editor The life of Science Olympiad’s budding class came full circle, but not in the best way. With education a target of Kansas budget cuts, Honors Science Investigations, a class a number of students took last year, was one of the classes taken off the Manhattan High schedule. “It was real disappointing because it worked so well for us,” coach Pat Lamb said. “They keep cutting money from education and they’ve got to know: it’s hurting people. [Our students] are some of the people who got hurt. The cuts took away something that was a real strong academic pursuit, but we had to make cuts and that was one of the casualties of them voting not to give money to education. It drives me crazy.” For the one year of its existence, the class brought Science Olympiad members together to study with their team and their coaches.
“The class was so helpful and gave each of us an opportunity to study something we really love. ,” senior Rebekah Hennesy said. When Hennesy found out the class would be cut, she immediately signed up for an hour of study hall for extra time to work on her events. “I do worry that the quality
up taking State and moving on to Nationals. “The guy that was disqualified last year...I watched him personally launch his [aircraft] 30, 60 times. [He] never had a problem with the launching apparatus,” Lamb said. “He worked so hard on straightening it out and he had it down. It wasn’t his fault. It was just a luck thing.” Lamb also believes that the class allowed the team to focus. “We practiced so much more efficiently. I think it made a huge difference last year,” Lamb said. “Matter of fact, I think if our team had all been in the class, we could have rocked places. Not win by nine points, but rock the competition. We’ve had our run of bad luck so I think this is our year. We’re going to have to work just as hard as we did last year, and that’s awfully hard.” Coach Dick Nelson agrees. “I was not surprised with all the talk of budget cuts, but I
“It worked so well for us...they keep cutting money from education and they’ve got to know: it’s hurting people.”
-Lamb
of studying will go down as I won’t necessarily have access to my partners and coaches,” Hennesy said. “I’m hoping that it won’t affect the team too much because we’ll try to meet more outside of class. [Getting to Nationals] would be such a great closing chapter to my three years with the Science Olympiad team.” The team took second at State last year, facing a disqualification in an event that could have put them nine points ahead of the team that ended
SEE SCIENCE PAGE 3
English teachers align curriculum throughout district TARA MAGAñA
Blue M Assist. Verbal Editor Walking into English classrooms throughout the district, students may notice something that wasn’t there before: Essential Questions. Now, the Vertical Alignment Team has introduced six questions throughout the district with the purpose of aligning curriculum. “Essential Questions are basically the broad questions that you come back to over and over again, either within a work or it could be throughout the semester,” team member and Manhattan High English teacher Wendy Howard said. “We’ve also created some Essential Questions that we want the district to use from K-12
that we hit each year so that students can see how each year of English is related and changing and growing.” Made up of one or two English teachers from every grade level K-12, the Vertical Alignment Team came together with a goal of creating commonalities between the different grades and classes in order to make sure each student is on the same page. The questions have also made planning and instruction more effective for teachers. “I don’t have to stand up in front of the class and lecture as much and try to fill brains with knowledge,” English teacher Tammy Sheffield said. “Students are actually more responsible for their learning
GLOBAL NEWS MADELINE MARSHALL Print Editor-in-Chief
Global news is a vital part of news today and can directly affect MHS students. In order to inform our readers, The Mentor has compiled small summaries describing some of the largest happenings in the world today. We encourage the reader to read about these topics, and others, in greater depth.
Refugee crisis worsens, European leaders take new actions
European leaders have been struggling to manage this massive influx of people in these past few weeks. Last week, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker set out proposals for mandatory quotas for European Union countries to take in 120,000 refugees who were already in Italy, Greece and Hungary. These numbers would not include plans made in May to move
because they have to formulate their opinions and then they have to support why they say something instead of me saying ‘here’s the facts.’” Though not all teachers have the questions up in their room yet, some English teachers, such as Judy McClendon, have already begun implementing their use in the classroom. “[McClendon] wanted us to understand why we’ve been writing and why writing’s important and how we’re going to use it a lot in our future jobs and just in life in general and it can help us in our studies and stuff,” senior Emily Wilson said.
SEE ENGLISH PAGE 3 40,000 from Italy and Greece. There is still uncertainty surrounding the fate of the Syrian and Iranian refugees and the tension grows higher as more lives are lost.
California in state of emergency due to wildfires With two wildfires devouring more than 100,000 acres of land near Sacramento and killing four firefighters, Gov. Jerry Brown was forced to declare a state of emergency on Sunday. The fire started on Saturday and was very fast moving, destroying 40,000 acres in the
English teacher Judy McClendon lectures. McClendon was one of the first to implement the Essential Questions. PHOTO BY MAKENNA EILERT
first day. Thousands of residents have fled their homes as approximately 5,000 firefighters battle with the fires.
Police tackles former tennis player James Blake; police brutality brought back into spotlight New York police have released video footage of the mistaken arrest of retired professional tennis player James Blake. Blake was going to the US Open when a plain-clothed officer approached him and knocked him to the ground. Po-
lice say he was misidentified as a suspect in a fraud case. Blake has claimed that the officer used improper force when he was slammed to the ground on Wednesday. Blake, who is of mixed race, said race may have contributed to the incident and that his primary concern was with the amount of force used. The department has lately been involved in many prominent cases involving accusations of police brutality, the most prominent being the killing of Eric Garner by illegal chokehold.