Elena Wu-Yan and Shanti Hossain
The campus of Princeton High School is certainly quieter than usual right now, without a crowd of 1,400 students bustling through its hallways. Yet even now, at the peak of summer, life pulsates throughout the building, if in smaller groups and for different reasons than one expects during the school year.
The school’s office workers come through the main doors at their predictable summer hours. Sitting at the same desks and answering the same telephones as they do throughout the school year, they seem unaffected by the end of the school year, which for them only signifies the beginning of preparation for September.
The guidance office, in particular, is frantically busy with finalizing student schedules in preparation for mailing them out at the end of August. Having created classes and given students a rudimentary placement, counselors are now working out the kinks: for example, when a student has requested two classes that occur at the same time, requiring a tough choice or tricky rearrangement.
PHS’s office workers, reporting to the same place for the same job they hold during the school year, are anomalies; far more common among the school’s summer dwellers are those with no ties to PHS whatsoever.
Prevalent among these independents are sports groups making use of PHS’s facilities. In the last week of June, for example, the Lynch basketball camp, run by Mike Lynch, occupied the school’s gymnasiums, with boys and girls ages 8 through 14 drilling and competing during the morning and afternoon.
During this week, Princeton Recreation Department’s Camp Carter basketball camp was also held at PHS for rising 5th through 9th grade boys. Out on the turf field, the recreation department’s Women’s Summer Lacrosse program welcomed a mix of high school students, college players and adults to evening games on Monday evenings throughout mid-June and July.
With August, however, begins the transition from campers to preseason athletes as the major inhabitants of PHS’s sports facilities, with football players bulking up in the weight room to soccer players getting used to their home turf. And throughout the summer have been independent exercisers, using the school’s open tennis courts and pumping music through its indoor fitness center.
Meanwhile, another camp had students practicing on the Performing Arts Center’s stage and taking lessons in the school’s music classrooms; this was the Philadelphia Jazz Orchestra’s Jazz Week, lead by one of the school’s band teachers, Joe Bongiovi, with help from district and other local teachers. Held in two separate weeks one in June, and one in August each camp culminated in a concert by the campers and by PJO, the jazz band of its namesake.
Though many of the students in the jazz camp were members of district music programs, the camp was operated as part of PJO, Bongiovi’s privately operated jazz band, and not part of the high school jazz program. This is true for most of the programs and events taking place over the summer; they are merely tenants on the high school’s campus, uncontrolled by the school. To use PHS’s space, said Princeton Recreation Department’s Program Supervisor Joe Marrolli, camps and other programs merely need to submit a facility request to the school.
The exception to this, as the only organized program the high school runs on its own campus, is the SAT and college prep program run by the PHS’s guidance department. With three workshops offered SAT programs in math and language skills, as well as one on writing college essays the program appeals more to rising sophomores through seniors, worrying about boosting test scores and improving their college applications even over the summer.
Beginning on July 30, participants sat down in the handful of classrooms designated for the five- or seven-day workshops, taking practice tests and learning tips from a staff of district teachers.
”We teach them strategies to help optimize time. They learn the structure of the test and develop a personal approach for it,” said PHS English teacher Aaron Thayer.
With courses beginning either at 9 a.m. or 12:30 p.m., the students must dedicate a fair portion of their day to the program, which, according to Thayer, is “a lot less stressful and more simple and predictable” than school.
These students along with the campers on PHS’s fields and stage, the office workers reporting for their shifts, and even the janitors ever cleaning up after the camps or organizing lockers and classrooms in preparation for the school year have kept the high school alive throughout the summer.
With almost all 1,400 of its primary occupants having wiped it from their minds, the Princeton High School campus is on summer vacation, treated to a quieter few months with a different crowd coming through its doors.
Of course, its vacation lasts only as long as the students are away. Come Sept. 6, it will inevitably return to the rushing, crowded way of life that, for most of the year, is the norm.
Elena Wu-Yan and Shanti Hossain are students at Princeton High School.
