The Campanile
Tuesday, May 17, 2022
A8
Editorials Editors-in-Chief Margot Blanco • Rachel Feinstein • Cayden Gu Justin Gu • Jerry Xia News & Opinion Editors Tiffany He Hannah Singer
Managing Editors Erik Feng
Sports Editors Dinu Deshpande Brianna Zhou
Lifestyle Editors Lillian Clark Christie Hong
Business Manager Shiki Toyama ART BY AJAY VENKATRAMAN
"AND FOR OUR NEXT ITEM... WAIT WHERE DID EVERYONE GO??"
Enrollment drop hurts school resources, class offerings
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n the face of rising housing prices, declining birth rates and COVID-19 school shutdowns, enrollment has dropped in many California school districts, including PAUSD. To ensure the high quality of a Palo Alto public education persists for future generations, The Campanile calls on PAUSD to build a long-term strategic plan to mitigate the effects of this demographic change. Since 2015, enrollment in PAUSD has dropped by over 2,000 students, most significantly in grades K-8. Barron Park Elementary School only had 31 students in its graduating class of 2021, illustrating the severity of the impending crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a trend of decreased enrollment in many school districts by increasing the viability of alternative forms of learning. In addition, according to the US Census, the number of U.S. births has declined every year since 2008 except in 2014. And skyrocketing housing prices have prevented young families with small children from moving in. The median price for a home now hovers around $4 million.
Potential implications of decreased enrollment include school funding shortfalls, teacher layoffs and even campus closures. Already, fewer students means fewer resources available to each school. With fewer teachers, class sizes are increasing, and non-seniors often have difficulty enrolling for elective classes they do not have priority in. Moreover, because of fewer teachers to cover Paly’s immense course options, more teachers are being forced to travel between schools and teach subjects they have little to no experience in. Fewer summer course resources are also available than in the past. The Living Skills summer program now only accepts rising seniors and requires an application. Opportunities to move ahead or retake classes in math are also becoming limited. The issue of enrollment will only continue to snowball unless district administrators and board of education members take action. In November 2021, the board of education voted to create a lottery to increase enrollment at Fletcher Middle School where enrollment had fallen by 30% since 2015. The Campanile commends this decision as a way to balance enrollment
!"#$%&$'()#$(%*$$+$+% ,"%'++#$((%-$*,'*./%0#1(1( Fentanyl, a highly toxic narcotic, has increasingly become a source for concern in the Bay Area. In the ongoing fentanyl crisis, over 106 deaths from the drug were reported in Santa Clara County in the past year. To promote public health and community safety, The Campanile supports efforts by the county to stop drug misuse and urges more be done by the county to address the fentanyl problem with drug awareness education and increased funding for law enforcement. As an opioid that is lethal in small doses, other drugs are often laced with fentanyl in powdered or pill form to increase their effect, augmenting the illegal drug problem. Legal fentanyl prescribed as a painkiller also poses an overdose threat. According to the California Department of Public Health, the opioid overdose death rate has increased by 139% since 2018. In Santa Clara County, hospital visits from opioid overdoses have increased 57.9% in the past year. District Attorney Jeff Rosen said fentanyl causes half of all drug overdoses in the county. To help reduce fentanyl overdoses, Santa Clara County announced the creation of a fentanyl task force in a February press release. This task force will work to stop fentanyl trafficking and increase drug awareness campaigns, an effort The Campanile supports. With both county officials and community members affected by this drug crisis, the task force is a welcome addition in the fight against drug misuse. However, The Campanile urges more efforts to be made across the Bay Area in drug education and response efforts. Fentanyl test strips should be provided by the county and be readily available for public use so individuals can test drugs for fentanyl content. Education on the dangers of illegal drugs and opioids should also be emphasized to a greater extent in schools, for example, as a part of Living Skills. With better public education, a large number of overdoses could be avoided and lives could be saved. While Santa Clara County has made commendable efforts by establishing a crisis response team, The Campanile also thinks more funding should be provided to law enforcement. In a fentanyl task force meeting, Sgt. Scott Williams emphasized county police departments lack narcotic testing devices in the field. To address this issue, more funding should be provided for drug testing hardware allowing police to apprehend fentanyl dealers. When weighed with the interest of public safety and security, programs to combat the fentanyl crisis are clearly worth the cost. The Campanile urges Santa Clara County to increase drug education efforts to raise awareness and dedicate more funding to law enforcement to combat fentanyl distribution.
across schools, but larger preventive measures must also be taken. Superintendent Don Austin said redrawing district lines is not an option being discussed, but with an impending crisis at hand, The Campanile urges PAUSD to implement a committee to study the long-term impacts of declining enrollment and consider other potential solutions, such as allowing students from other districts to enroll in PAUSD and subsidizing housing costs for families with young students. In doing so, PAUSD will be able to maintain low class sizes, retain a top-notch teaching staff and continue to enable excellence in education for all its students. Although The Campanile recognizes the enrollment problem is partly due to broader demographic and economic changes out of the district’s control, PAUSD is still responsible for guaranteeing the best educational experience for its students. Ultimately, that means making the issue of declining enrollment a priority action item and taking active, preventive measures to safeguard the quality of a PAUSD education for decades to come.
Ben Antonow Sophia Austin
Staff Writers
Eric Fan Aidan Seto Jack Galetti Zack Silver Gina Bae Lucas Guan Maya Singer Poppy Barclay Charlotte Hallenbeck Shamsheer Singh Nikhil Behal Braden Leung Cole Sturino Anaya Bhatt Lucy Li Ajay Venkatraman Gianna Brogley Ali Minhas Colleen Wang Valerie Chu Ken Ogata Parker Wang Lauren Chung Kyla Schwarzbach Austin Xiang Shantanu Deshpande Joy Xu
Illustrators & Photographers
JT Bard Wallie Butler
James Churchley Phillip Churchley Anushe Irani
Jimmy Miller Zina Zhang
Adviser
Rodney Satterthwaite
Letters to the Editors: Email all letters to editors to theeds23@googlegroups.com. The Campanile prints letters on a space-available basis. We reserve the right to edit submissions. The Campanile only prints signed letters. Advertisements: Advertisements with The Campanile are printed with signed contracts. For more information regarding advertisements or sponsors in The Campanile and their size options and prices, please contact The Campanile Business Managers by email at campanile.ads@gmail.com. Note: It is the policy of The Campanile to refrain from printing articles that misrepresent or alienate specific individuals within the Palo Alto community. The Campanile would like to thank the PTSA for supporting the mailing of our newspaper. Our Vision Statement: The Campanile has upheld the highest standard of student journalism for the last century by engaging the community through various mediums of storytelling. Our coverage of news, culture and athletics aims to represent the diverse perspectives of our student body.
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Dear Editors, Since returning to school in-person this year, we have been grateful for the free lunch the school provides. However, we have become concerned with the amount of food waste during lunch. Since Governor Newsom launched a free school meals program, we have witnessed trash bins filled with edible food. We noticed most students are unaware of the unintended climate-related effect of food ending up in landfills. Food waste is a leading cause of the climate change crisis. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, up to 40% of all food in the U.S. is wasted. In Palo Alto alone, 26% of garbage is composed of food waste. When wasted food ends up in landfills, the rotting process generates methane, a harmful greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Yearly, 135 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions are created by American food waste as reported by the U.S. Environmental Protections Agency. Tons of energy, land, labor and 25% of all freshwater also goes towards producing food that we never eat. Additionally, results.org states that the food-insecurity rate has more than doubled nationally during the pandemic: SJSU Scholarworks published that 33% in our community are faced with hunger, and NPR reported that food prices are projected to skyrocket due to the war in Ukraine. This led us to co-found the non-profit, People Plates Planet. Our mission is to recover surplus food from school campuses and divert it to help those suffering from hunger. We also aim for a green future by conserving the water and energy used in producing otherwise wasted food while also providing nutritious meals for the community’s most vulnerable members. With the support of Paly PTSA and Paly staff, we successfully launched our program at Paly on Earth Day, April 22. We held an educational campaign to raise awareness about how students can support a more sustainable planet by donating their unwanted lunch items in the food recovery boxes we set up. With an enrollment of over 2,000 students at Paly, we were able to provide dozens of food items and meals in one day to LifeMoves Opportunity Center, a local community partner that provides supportive services for homeless families and single adults. Upon arrival, staff and residents at LiveMoves Opportunity Center were appreciative of our delivery, and the food was immediately put to good use. As a result, we are also eliminating the amount of food waste that ends up in landfills. Going forward, we plan to continue placing the recovery boxes at Paly cafeteria to combat global warming and fight hunger simultaneously. Sincerely, Oscar Anderson and Kai Mirchandani
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