_______________ east meadow ______________
your HEALTH body / mind / fitness
With a focus on August 11, 2022
we lln es s
HERALD Your Health
Family Wellness Inside Vol. 22 No. 33
Students learn about the police
New firefighting foam for EMFD
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AUGUST 11 - 17, 2022
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Changing the dress code Woodland Middle Schooler calls for policy update By MAlloRY WIlSoN mwilson@liherald.com
Woodland Middle School student Sabrina Rosenberg saw the East Meadow School District was rocking an “old school” dress code, and the 12-year-old decided it was time for a change. Sabrina was flipping through her school-issued planner when she came across the district dress code. What she found was an outdated policy that seemed very unfair to some students, especially girls. After writing an opinion piece for the school newspaper, speaking at a Board of Education meeting, and meeting with Superintendent Kenneth Card and Board of Education President Alisa Baroukh, Sabrina heard the first reading of the new dress code policy at the most recent BOE meeting on Aug. 3. “I didn’t think it would get this far,” Sabrina said. “I imagined they would do something but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t think I’d be involved in the process but it feels really nice.” Sabrina said that she wrote her piece — “An Old-School Dress Code and Current Times” — for her school newspaper, the Woodland Word, in the
beginning of the school year. After many revisions, it was published in the early spring. The story was sent to the BOE and she spoke at their March 9 meeting. The piece outlined everything about the dress code she felt should change. This included leggings and bike shorts being banned, the length requirement of shorts and skirts, heavy metal T-shirts not being allowed, and spaghetti strap tank tops, among other rules. “It was really biased,” Sabrina said of the dress code. “A lot of it was just old and it was biased against girls.” She also pointed out that the restricted dress list for girls was six times as long as the list for the boys. Even though neither she nor any of her friends have ever been called out for dress code violations, she still felt like a change needed to be made. “I was just not happy with the dress code,” Sabrina said. “It made me really mad actually, it was really restrictive.” For her, getting leggings and the heavy metal t-shirts off the dress code list was a priority. Encouraged by her parents to speak at the March 9 meeting, Sabrina was met with support Continued on page 10
Katrina O’Brien/Herald
Singing his heart out Paul Zadoff, a 101-year-old World War ii veteran, sang ‘God Bless America’ on Aug. 6 at the Salute to Veterans ceremony and concert at Eisenhower Park’s Larry Chapin Lakeside Theatre. Story, more photos, Page 3.
Microsoft PowerPoint and Word and Excel, oh my! By MAlloRY WIlSoN mwilson@liherald.com
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ast Meadow High School graduate Tristan Pesqueira took his classroom knowledge to the real world winning the 2022 Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship for PowerPoint Pesqueira competed against 95 others in the world championships July 24 to 27 in Anaheim, California after winning the national competition in June in Dallas hosted by Microsoft to test students’s skills in Microsoft Office Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. “Winning these competitions was never on the forefront of my
mind,” Pesqueira said. “After I took both exams for the national and the international one I didn’t think I was going to win.” At East Meadow, Pesqueira took the Multimedia class, where students learn the programs of the Microsoft Office Suite. The class promotes students getting MOS certified to validate their proficiency in technical skills. Pasqueira took Multimedia 4 his senior year and took Microsoft Office Specialist tests to qualify for competitions. He had a perfect score in PowerPoint. “The Microsoft Office Specialist World Championship is one of our favorite events annually, because these students are thrilled to compete, and they
inspire all of us with their competitive spirit and crowning achievement,” Rick Hermann, a Microsoft vice president, said in a statement. “These students work diligently to earn valuable industry-recognized certifications, and we know that the future is bright with upcoming business and technology leaders like those we met at the MOS World Championship.” Students had to complete two parts to show their skills. The first was a 30-minute timed exam, the same style as the one he took for the national competition, but Pesqueira found this one difficult. “It was harder than the one at the national level,” he said. “I found it a lot more chal-
lenging and I didn’t really feel like I did good on it, but I guess it was designed that way.” The second part was a threehour research project. Pesqueira said a non-profit organization was brought in and the students were to make a project about the non-profit and the issues that they’re attempting to tackle. Pesqueira’s project was a PowerPoint presentation for the non-
profit, Empower, highlighting its mission to provide at-risk young people in emerging market countries with the resources, skills and mentorship to improve their lives. “I was initially a little worried about that, because I thought it would involve being more creative and creativity is not really my strong suit,” Continued on page 4