'High School' is being shot at the near abandoned Parker Campus. I will admit it does put Parker to good use, but was this the intended use?
Did the tax payers really intend the bond money to be used to build a school to be used for a movie set for a month? I don't think so. I understand that the city and school district are getting decent financial benefits out of this, so I just ask this:
Use the money for something useful!
And do you know what would be useful: opening Parker as its own separate high school in the district.
So please board, and Mr. Gardella(who will most likely never see this), here is the plea from a student subject to your will: be smart about the money being gained from this. Involve the community and students if you must(highly suggested), but get this done.
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3 comments:
Good post. I agree that the money needs to be used wisely. Any ideas about what you would like to see done with it?
something that will benefit the students in a necessary way. meaning like how we have projects in every room, and the LCD TV's in the commons that no one watches. these are both unnecessary and shouldn't have been purchased since they are just a waste of money.
I agree about the TVs in the commons; I have yet to see them used for any sort of presentations or anything other than playing sports channels at lunch. As far as I can see, the TVs have no use, and are even more useless if they're just playing sports all the time (which is mostly only of interest to guys, and not all of them at that). The news would at least be better. A channel that isn't FOX (conservative news channel) or CNN (liberal news channel) to keep things neutral, which I know the school is all for in order to keep clear of controversy.
The money could be used to keep classes open. Two years ago in the spring, about 12 people signed up to take AP Statistics (myself included) for last school year (2007-2008). It was decided that there weren't enough students for it, so the class was canceled. (I'd like to point out that there were many 6 to 10-student flex classrooms last year. These classes probably weren't canceled because the school/board didn't want it known that flex scheduling wasn't all that popular. To me, it seemed like this was just to "save face.") As I result, I went into AP Calculus last year. This year, because there are now 2 years of kids (juniors and seniors) wanting to take AP Stats, there is one class of 35 or so kids (a few kids were turned away too, I believe).
Also, French 4 was canceled because there weren't enough kids for the funding "to be worth it," so French 4 kids now have to take French online. I don't believe online classes are the best way to learn (some may be...but certainly none of the online classes offered at HHS), and it's nearly impossible to learn a language without hearing how it is spoken. The best you can do is learn how to write it, which is useless when you need to know how to actually speak it.
Other ways to use the money could be supporting some of the student clubs and the student newspaper (which I'm pretty sure is funded solely by the work of the journalism students selling subscriptions and ads to local businesses - which is a difficult task, especially when businesses are highly reluctant to part with cash in the poor economy that we are in). The Main Four (which I hope you know is the name of the school newspaper) is one of the few key forms of communication within the school (along with the morning announcements and posters in the halls), but it would also benefit the Howell community as a whole by showing exactly what wonderful things students are doing and what they're concerned about, thus ridding of HHS's (and the city of Howell's) tarnished image as a magnet for controversy, as is presented by the Press and Argus. One adult I spoke with also said that if people (especially the older people in the community who have absolutely no idea what's going on inside the school because they no longer have kids in it) knew what HHS is TRULY like, they would be more apt to supporting mileages for the school.
And Wendy, I'm sure if the board brought your question to the students, they could think of many more ideas than I come up with.
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