ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW LAM

School continues to fail freshmen

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Incoming freshmen often fear adapting from their middle schools to a foreign environment. With distance learning in place, the school’s duty to aid freshmen with transitioning to high school is now more important than ever. However, the school, once again, is irresponsibly neglecting its duties by being extremely uncommunicative and unorganized.

Motivating Matadors (MoMa), a freshman assimilation program, carries the responsibilities of introducing freshmen to the campus and assisting them with adapting to high school. Yet, regardless of being cognizant of the vital role they play, the club has done nothing since school began. The first couple of months MoMa attempted to coordinate ultimately amounted to nothing, denying freshmen of a smoother transition. MoMa’s inactivity greatly impaired freshmen as the first months are crucial when acclimating into new surroundings. 

While MoMa is the main source of support for freshmen, the administration is just as accountable for helping them. By not displaying an ounce of effort to assist freshmen with adjusting to high school, the administration left an entire incoming class feeling lost, confused, and stressed. The administration disregarded hosting a freshman summit and instead diverted the responsibility to student bodies, namely ASB. 

However, ASB was just as ineffective. Having freshmen rely solely on ASB’s weekly homeroom videos is a futile attempt at distributing information. Homeroom videos hardly scrape the surface of information compared to what MoMa supposedly covers. Besides homeroom videos, ASB’s club fair was a debacle. The club fair’s poor organization defeated its purpose of teaching freshmen about clubs, hindering them from becoming involved with the school. The club fair was not advertised whatsoever, and the times, locations, and dates were neither announced nor clarified. 

Admittedly, it is more difficult to aid freshmen with transitioning to high school in a virtual setting, but the school is obligated to produce a greater effort to help freshmen adapt to high school. There is no excuse as every other aspect of school, including classes and extracurriculars, adapted. The bare minimum is being organized and communicative, but the school failed to accomplish either of those.

It is unrealistic to have one school group bear the responsibility of being freshmen’s main source of guidance. MoMa must become active and collaborate with other school resources, such as ASB, to accommodate the needs of freshmen. Through virtual meetings, freshmen can communicate any concerns as MoMa is meant to be a welcoming community of peers.

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6 thoughts on “School continues to fail freshmen

  1. Nah cuz I ain’t waste my time sending 33 emails to the freshman about ways they could get involved in school…if I wanted to join MoMa instead of ASB I would’ve at least ASB is trying maybe newspaper could make an article about important information to freshman instead of whatever this monstrosity of an article this was….

     
  2. Admin makes up the bulletin for asb and we just present it, maybe get all your info before writing a whole article about it. By the way we have to do this every week it’s exhausting to say the least and it’s a strain on tech and media to have to edit it. It’s not like the freshman are awake during homeroom anyways.

     
  3. This article is ignorant and seems to be an attack on MOMA and ASB. This is the first time we have ever been in a situation like this and ASB as well as MOMA are trying their best to get information around to freshmen. There is only so much we can do and not only that we have our own responsibilities to balance as well. The pandemic has made things so much more difficult and ASB does the best they can with homeroom videos every week as well as coordinating with the school’s staff to try our best to plan accordingly. If you have any ideas, I would advise you to join one of the clubs you have mentioned above since you seem to be very worried about the “poor” job they are doing in spreading information to freshmen.

     
  4. majority of moma cab is spending their time applying to colleges on top of their schoolwork… i’d like to see you take on that responsibility of helping freshmen transition. it’s a strange time for all of us and it’s already hard enough to get freshmen to come to moma meetings in real life. what makes you think they would join on zoom. should’ve used this time to write a piece commemorating the seniors.

     
  5. This article was utterly unprofessional, but then again this is not my first time witnessing Newspaper bash on the efforts of ASB as well as MOMA and admin. Maybe consider being in the position of the members in the clubs. We have done absolutely everything we could have done for this school year. Not to mention how exhausting having to film every week for the students and for tech & media to consistently upload while barely having any time to manage their time for school. Not only was this unprofessional, but was also disrespectful. It cannot be helped that our effort were ineffective in the middle of the Pandemic. We have created many opportunities for the freshmen’s to get involved, and the outcome of it cannot be blamed solely upon the people that gave them the opportunity. Maybe next time try to actually help the Freshmen, not to mention the Senior?!??! Where were they included?? We have had many conversations where we talked about what can we do for Freshmen and such yet our discussions about what we can do for Seniors get pushed off for later. Try spreading news about events going on about school instead of silently waiting for a good moment to bash us instead… yea? xoxo:3

     
  6. I am going to disagree in that 1) in a time where everyone has been forced to do online learning and online meetings during the pandemic, you can’t expect everyone to uphold the same amount of quality as in-person classes or events, and 2) you can’t expect everyone to be involved in online events/meetings if they find it to be a waste of their time. Sure, maybe more engagement and responsiveness should be done by both organizations (i.e. icebreakers, informational meetings, involvement fairs), but they can’t expect all freshman to do their part in getting themselves involved with MoMA/ASB. It is up to the freshmen’s discretion if they want to listen to weekly meetings and to take initiative about their educational matters, and if there are events that ASB/MoMA host that they don’t end up participating in, that’s on them. ASB/MoMA members are also students, and they have their own difficulties and issues to attend to, but it seems as though you all are portraying them as doing the bare minimum when, from my understanding, at least ASB is doing their part in keeping the school involved. It’s also just as unreasonable to put the organizations at such high expectations as this is the first time these organizations have experienced a pandemic that required them to adapt to connecting freshmen online. Additionally, if you see that there is a problem in both organizations, why not provide solutions and feedback that they need in order for them to improve as a whole? I find this to be more negative than constructive criticism, and fails to give both clubs the acknowledgement that they are at least doing something notable because the school administration chooses to bear this weight to the clubs. Maybe you should criticize the administration for not doing their part on bearing some responsibility on addressing the freshman, or expecting freshman to know what they’re doing instead of guiding them through their high school career. It feels as though this article was incredibly brushed over without acknowledging both sides of the situation and the circumstances everyone has been going through, but if it is a statement that the staff as a whole agreed to, then so be it.

     

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