By Marissa Delikouras
From its online resources to its peer leadership programs, Princeton High School underwent changes in various areas as the new 2012-2013 school year began.
Students returning to PHS in September were affected by such changes, which altered their daily academic lives to an extent. With about a month of school in session, the student body has come to realize the advantages of certain reformations, while viewing others as unnecessary disturbances to school-wide systems previously in place.
A notable change, the renovated district website, could be observed before the school doors even opened to students. The arrangement of the new site, and particularly that of the PHS page, seems to make navigation and access to specific resources easier for students. School news is featured in the center of the page, allowing for a quick understanding of upcoming events and other happenings at PHS.
Other popular links such as “Powerschool” and “Teacher Pages,” can be easily found at first glance on the left sidebar and top bracket of the page, respectively.
”It looks a lot cleaner,” says Grace Rifkin ‘13. “It just automatically looks easier to navigate, and it is.”
”Peer Group” is a leadership program at PHS that allows selected senior leaders to aid the incoming freshmen with the high school transition process. Every Wednesday afternoon, a partnership of two seniors works with a group of freshmen. In previous years, mid-year alterations would occur, in which each senior would be placed with a new partner and the freshmen groups would be rearranged to create new combinations of students.
This year, however, the senior partnerships and their assigned groups will remain the same throughout the entire school year. Although this doesn’t allow for the seniors and freshmen to form new interactions and relationships via the program, Rifkin, a Peer Group leader at PHS, approves of this new system.
”It gives us an opportunity to get a lot closer with our co-leaders and our freshmen,” she says. “We have the entire school year to really build all of the relationships, as opposed to building them up and then separating everyone and having to start the process again.”
A change that seems to irritate some returning students is their assignments to new guidance counselors.
According to Simon Gabriel ‘14, this is “bad for students, because just as they get used to and close to one counselor, the counselor suddenly changes.”
The changes in the guidance system might also affect the college application process for current seniors.
”It doesn’t sound too bad, but it really does hurt the college recommendation process because these new counselors can’t really write about our personalities and personal memories if they barely know who we are,” says Michelle Lin ‘13.
Some other changes include the new district logo, new staff members, and alterations in annual events, such as Homecoming. As PHS students, we are in favor of some, but dislike others.
Nonetheless, Menelaos Mazarakis ‘14 thinks that although change is hard to come by, “it is good for our school system, as we are constantly learning from our mistakes and resolving them.”
Marissa Delikouras is a senior at Princeton High School.

