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STUDENT VOICE OF MILPITAS HIGH SCHOOL
Teacher shortage, resignations affect new hires and students By Alexander Phan
MHS has seen the unexpected departure of four teachers this school year, Principal Francis Rojas said. This was because the teachers took administration roles or left for personal reasons, he said. Former Teachers Alexandra Nguyen, Paul Cao, Bridget Hall, and Lindsay Guttierez resigned from their teaching positions at MHS, Rojas said. The resignation of these teachers have caused administration to recruit teachers using a new system called the New Teacher Academy, he said. “What I’ve noticed over the last two years is that with all of our teachers retiring or moving on, we’re bringing in a lot of new teachers,” Rojas said. “With a school this size, it’s easy for teachers to become just like students and fall through the cracks. Some say that they don’t know where to ask questions. So one thing that I’ve established through our school site council and our School Improvement Plan for Student Achievement (SIPSA) was our plan to provide a New Teacher Academy for all new teachers,” Rojas said. The New Teacher Academy will allow the school to be able to recruit experienced teachers for the school as well as provide weekly communication to help newer teachers, Rojas said. “There’s quite a large range of teachers. I wanted to find a way to provide that support for new teachers because we hired some really good teachers this year. I don’t want to lose them,” Rojas said, “Our school plan was to provide a New Teacher Academy for all new teachers with monthly meetings. Collaboration days once a month that they’ll come and learn about relevant topics to that month,” Rojas said. The resignation and shortage of
teachers has not had a huge effect on scheduling classes, Counselor Beth Harke said. “This year’s scheduling has been as difficult as it’s always been,” Harke said. With the resignation of some specialized teachers such as Hall, who taught fashion design, some classes had to be dissolved, Rojas said. “I discussed this with Miss Hall. Fashion design was one of those classes that had very low enrollment. The logical thing you would do is to just collapse those classes and dissolve them. We did a similar thing with creative writing,” Rojas said. “The credentials for teachers to teach things like fashion design and foods are called credentials for family consumer science. They’re very rare. You will almost never find a teacher with that credential.” Students such as Senior Justin Nguyen are disappointed by the resignation of teachers. The dissolvement of some classes such as fashion design have been a let down for students, Nguyen said. “I’m kind of disappointed that fashion design closed. I always thought it was an interesting class to have instead of the typical academic electives our school has,” Nguyen said. “I’m hoping that it comes back sometime in the future. Even though I wasn’t planning on taking it, I think it would be good for the atmosphere of the school.” The school has been lucky enough to replace some of the teachers who resigned, such as Cao and Guttierez, Rojas said. “Miss Guitteriez’s position was already filled. We’re really lucky to get a very experienced teacher that has experience with English language development. That is Miss Kim,” Rojas said. “We were able to have her and Gutierrez overlap for a week so they could transition off and train.”
Eye on Campus: Seniors attend Picnic
neval mulaomerovic | THE UNION
At Saratoga Springs, students participated in activities such as table tennis, swimming, hiking, temporary tattoos, bocce, and volleyball.
ginnie lo | THE UNION
Students in AVID Teacher Bridget Hall’s class form small groups to solve a math problem together. One student presents the question on the board while group members and an assigned tutor assist them.
AVID program to be expanded school wide By Neval Mulaomerovic
Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) curricula and strategies are to be expanded to more classes with the goal of making the program schoolwide over the next few years, Principal Francis Rojas said. Teachers have been and will continue to be trained in ways to implement AVID concepts in core courses, he said. Throughout the 25 years it has been offered at MHS, AVID has remained an elective period in which students practice note-taking and discussion strategies with the help of tutors and student-led groups, Rojas said. Within the AVID class, students focus on college and career readiness skills, study skills, and mentorships, he said. “There are certain ways that
the students in the AVID elective learn that should be spread schoolwide,” Rojas said. “There are classrooms where you are just talked to, and there are classrooms where a teacher poses a question and you discuss to create your own idea around it. In this latter type of instruction, which we call student-centered learning, students learn a lot more because they’re the ones engaging with the knowledge.” AVID employs Writing, Inquiry, Collaboration, Organization, and Reading (WICOR) strategies to help students organize thoughts, research, and notes, AVID Lead Liza Gable-Ferguson said. Applying these concepts in core classes could increase course rigor, student engagement, and student understanding of the significance of their material, she said. “When we talk to the business
world and workplaces, they want us to create inventive and creative thinkers who know how to collaborate with others, read, write, and be organized,” Gable-Ferguson said. “I think we are meeting career needs, and that’s exactly what you need to do to be successful in college. We can’t train students for jobs anymore because the job of tomorrow is not invented yet, but we can train you on how to learn.” Over the past two summers, more than 30 teachers attended the official AVID Summer Institute to be trained in AVID strategies, Rojas said. Those teachers then lead groups within their departments to train other MHS teachers on ways to integrate AVID concepts in class, he said. “There’s a wealth of knowlSEE “AVID” ON PAGE 8
Senior quotes no longer offered in yearbook By Alexander Phan
Senior quotes will not be included in this year’s school yearbook, Yearbook Advisor Fiona Walker said. This decision was made because of frustrations from inappropriate quotes from previous years, she said. On top of the inappropiate quotes, senior quotes will also be removed due to the extra amount of work it exerts on the yearbook staff, Walker said. “First of all, adding senior quotes takes a considerable amount of extra time, and we just don’t have the staff to do it. Yearbook enrollment numbers are drastically down,” Walker said. “Second, every year, despite multiple warnings not to, we have a huge amount of students who submit inappropriate quotes.” The decision to remove senior quotes was not impulsive, as the idea was considered for prior editions of the yearbook, Walker said. Previous years have given the yearbook staff many grievances, Walker said. “I’ve considered cutting them
every year because of this problem,” Walker said. “The year before last I caught an insanely dirty quote that had slipped by us. The book had already been completely submitted. In order to get that page back to fix it, I had to pay a huge fine and it made me furious. Last year, there was an uproar about the inappropriate quotes being changed, even after students were warned repeatedly. It made it clear that it was no longer in our best interest to provide the service.” This decision was considered by many people in yearbook, rather than being a single impulse choice, Yearbook Editor in Chief Arianne Mayo said. “The decision was made by Ms. Walker and my three editors-in-chief, who already graduated last year.” Mayo said. It is a possibility that the only students who will receive senior quotes will be the staff members who worked on the yearbook, Walker said. “I’m playing with the idea of just letting the yearbook kids have senior quotes as a perk for
taking the class.” Walker said, “Like I said, our enrollment numbers have been down. I’m not sure yet, though.” Students such as Senior Nicolas Agleham have stated their disappointment at the removal of seniors quotes from the yearbook. While the decision is disappointing, it is understandable why the yearbook staff took them out, Agleham said. “I feel like it could’ve been handled a little bit differently instead of taking [quotes] away entirely,” Agleham said. “It’s not that everybody is trying to do inappropriate jokes or quotes. A lot of us just want to have something memorable that other people can remember us by.” Senior Freddy Chi believes that the removal of senior quotes is unjustified as it prohibits students from expressing themselves. “Taking away the ability for about 800 people to express themselves for the sake of stopping ten to twenty people is completely stupid,” Chi said.