Rockville may lower voting age

by Aisosa Ojo-Adjase, Claire Yu and Hannah Lee NEWS WRITER AND NEWS EDITORS

Rockville’s Board of Supervisors of Elections (BSOE) have forwarded a proposal to lower the city’s voting age from 18 to 16 years.

“I don’t think most high school age people have the awareness of [city] issues.”

If the proposal is approved, Rockville would be the second city nationwide to lower its voting age to 16, after Takoma Park. Eligible teens could register to vote while they get their driver’s license. The Commission also aims for potentially increasing voter turnout with the lower age.

Schools are often used as voting centers. cilmember Mark Pierzchala, disagree. “I don’t think most high school age people have the awareness of [city] issues and knowledge of the impacts of various positions on how people live their lives in Rockville,” he said. “An election year is not the year to implement any other changes… [as they will] likely to favor one group of people or another.”

This idea has been in the works since last year, after Rockville city officials examined the effects of Takoma Park’s 2013 decision to drop the voting age. The Commission’s official 2022 report describes their reasons for lowering the voting age. It states that “[p] eople who are 16 and 17 years of age are a part of our community [and] are impacted by policies in which they have no voice.”

Some, like Rockville Coun-

VOTING cont. page 3 writing differs from human writing in complexity and variability (AI-generated text tends to have less of both), two characteristics which Princeton University senior Edward Tian has leveraged in order to create GPTZero, a program that detects ChatGPT writing.

GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer,” which indicates that the model generates new content rather than simply processing existing data. It was trained using Internet data prior to its launch and therefore only has accurate knowledge about the world up to September 2021.

Since GPTZero was trained on ChatGPT output, the more familiar a text appears to GPTZero, the more likely it was written by AI.

In addition to ethical concerns, ChatGPT raises identity and existential issues. “The question is, ‘do we still need to write?’” RM English teacher Robin Strickler said. “Until now, writing has been a human skill. Is it going to become a machine skill?””

- Ms. Robin Strickler

Additionally, ChatGPT’s neural network architecture is called a “transformer” because it has learned the relationships between the words in natural human dialogue and can thus “transform” its input into output. The model was trained using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, which works in three stages.

First, human trainers demonstrated desired out puts in response to a multi tude of human-written prompts. They then randomly selected model-written messages from conversations between hu man trainers and the chat bot, ranked them by quality and then fed that information to the model, allowing the chatbot to learn the most ap propriate responses for a par ticular input. Finally, the model improved and taught itself via trial and error, adapting its own rules as to what out put to produce and when.

Educators fear that ChatGPT encourages aca demic dishonesty because it can, for example, ‘write an essay in the style of a high school student’ in a way that is fully original and difficult for tools like TurnItIn to flag as plagiarism. The website has already been banned on MCPS WiFi. Even so, ChatGPT

According to Mrs. Strickler, it goes beyond the writing itself: relying on ChatGPT also means out-sourcing thinking and self-expression. “If you don’t write—if you’re constantly medicating that with a machine—do you learn to reflect?” she said. “Writing is a big means of thinking. And if we forget how to think, we’re screwed.”

As stated in the community email that Ms. Deeny sent later that day, the two incidents were not connected. “They are not related at all. It just happened to be an unfortunate situation where we were hit in a short period of time,” RM security assistant Matt Schwartzback said.

According to RM assistant principal Veena Roberson, the decision to implement the new ID policy came about following an evaluation of processes, in addition to feedback from students and staff in the community.

“We decided that this was an important step to address student safety and security concerns,” Ms. Roberson said. Some RM students feel that the heightened security requirements are inconvenient and unnecessary. “I don’t think it’s going to do too much to help, just because of the sheer amount of students that we have,” senior Nick Nash said. There are also those who are impartial. “I’m not sure if it’ll work out as planned,” freshman Darya Sakhi said. “I’ve never seen anything like it, so I don’t really have an opinion on it.”

Earlier this year, Walter John-

February son High School took comparable measures in response to the shooting at Magruder High School in January 2022. Similarly to RM, students at Walter Johnson must wear ID badges in the building and the doors are kept locked to limit entry. According to Walter Johnson’s student newspaper, The Pitch, their students must also display their IDs when they return from open lunch.

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During the advisory lesson in fifth period on Wednesday, Feb. 1, students were also reminded of RM’s safety expectations, including the fact that security will send persistent hallway walkers to in-school isolation, or potentially home.

Starting Thursday, Feb. 2, RM also enforced a clarified attendance policy: students who enter the building between 7:45-50 a.m. are sent to class without a pass; students who enter between 7:50 a.m. and the start of lunch or between the start of fifth period and 2:30 p.m. must sign in at the main office or attendance office. Students will then receive a pass to return to class.

The school held a virtual parent meeting on Jan. 31 to discuss these new policies. “We are going to be having [late students] sign in at a computer in the main office and if students are re-entering from a program like Edison, they will also need to be signing into the main office,” principal Alicia Deeny said during the meeting.

For now, the RM administration is still working on certain aspects of the updated safety rule, such as potentially creating a system for temporary IDs.

“Anytime there’s a new policy, there’s going to be a learning curve,” Ms. Roberson said. “There’s going to be parts…that we haven’t worked out until we actually go through the process.”

Currently, RM has hired one new security assistant who has been in the building since Monday, Feb. 6. She is the first and only female security assistant to join the staff.

Other future security measures could include “alarming multiple exterior doors so that security staff can focus their attention on a smaller set of entryways in focused locations” and schoolwide “retraining,” according to a community email sent out by Ms. Deeny on Jan. 26.