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January 29, 2010
Bach Phan
Somebody or something cut the fiber optics wires to the network in November. This is what many people expected when students in the Fremont building of the school could not sign into the school network. This was especially damaging because the computer classes are held in there. Computer teacher James Briano and freshman Vanessa Fernandez found rat droppings that were scattered around the room after Fernandez and Briano went into the network room to assess the damage. They also caught a glimpse of the mouse on the computer equipment. A couple days later, sophomore Nina Becquart and her friends managed to capture the mouse inside a garbage bin and let it outside.
“I was scared… it was gross,” Fernandez said.
Math teacher Mark Clevenger, who manages the school computer network that runs throughout the school, further inspected the damage to officially determine if the fiber optics were down. His take on the situation was very different from Briano and his students. He believes that somebody broke into the computer room and sabotaged the wires because the computer room is locked at all times.
“The cut marks [were] too clean to be rats.” Clevenger said.
Four wires were cut very close to the plug and uniformly. If the wires were further along their length, they would have to have been replaced. A wire that runs from the elevator all the way down to the business office, which would have been very costly to the school. The wires, however, were reconnected with another set of plugs. After Clevenger had informed the school that the wires had been damaged, the school contacted an outside contractor to come down and fix the cut wires. To this day, nobody is one hundred percent sure if the it was a person or a mouse that cut the wire.
Computer students had to change their curriculum while the network was being fixed. Briano’s class watched a movie and looked at parts of a computer, of which they would be quizzed on. Students would have been doing Excel work if the servers had not interrupted their session.
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October 16, 2009
Bach Phan
The long standing tradition of the Hello Dance will not be part of the school year this year.
The Hello Dance was going to feature new things. It was going to include a state of the art speaker system, which is supposed to be better than what most DJs have. The school also bought DJ software and 200 songs from iTunes. This was all an attempt to have our school be able to DJ ourselves and not have to hire professional DJs. The administrators were excited to bring about this new change, but things got in the way.
According to activity coordinator Helen Paris and principal Linda Fernandez, the money raised for the dance was not going to be able to offset the expenses of running a dance. The money that is needed to run a dance can be hefty. The district requires one custodian for every 150 people, five paid teachers, one administrator, Officer Foote and eight to ten parents to supervise. The overall cost to set up the Hello Dance would have been about $2000. The school tries to at least break even and have money for classes to invest in Senior Ball and Senior Week.
“We have to be frugal with our budget this year,” Fernandez said.
Paris and ASB expect every class to have at least $15,000 by their senior year going towards Senior Ball. There has to be at least 40 people to clean up and set up the dance.
“I’m not going to have a massive amount of manpower and have nobody show up,” Paris said.
Overall the ticket sale, which was believed to about 60 people buying tickets, is at about 50. This would not have been worth the expenses or the effort to put up the Hello Dance.
There are several reasons as to why the ticket sales for the Hello Dance were so low. The Hello Dance was moved to a later date because Paris planned to have the Up Yours Lunch prior to the dance. We did not get the API score increase that we were looking for. The Hello Dance was also scheduled at the same time as the Shoreline concert headlining Brad Paisley.
Next year Paris plans to move the dance two weeks earlier to make the desire to go more prevalent. They also plan on having the students buy the tickets sooner than they did this year.
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