PHS PERSPECTIVE: Sandy has set students to scrambling

By Elena Wu-Yan and Jane Dai
   At its onset, Superstorm Sandy seemed like a wonderful excuse for Princeton High School students to miss class, with a call from the school on Sunday afternoon before the storm, announcing that there would be no classes on Monday and Tuesday.
   School was closed again on Wednesday, then Thursday, and then Friday, completing the district’s unprecedented, unplanned week off from school.
   While students then had a whole 10 days to catch up on rest and homework, the long weekend, largely void of electricity, heat and Internet, had a significant impact on students and teachers afterward.
   An immediate result of the storm was the elimination of the district’s four-day-weekend the following week. The NJEA Convention, originally scheduled so that there would be no school on Nov. 8 and 9, was cancelled due to the hurricane’s effects on Atlantic City.
   Fortunately, this allowed the district to make up two of the five missed days, but as the winter season has not yet begun, snow days may present more complications as the year goes on.
   ”I think there is time to catch up, to build that time back in,” said Gary Snyder, principal of PHS. “But if we lose four, five, however many snow days, that could change everything.”While these two extra days helped most students and teachers to get closer to where they needed to be, other students had already made plans for the original long weekend and needed to miss an additional two days of school. One such student, Diane Karloff ‘14, planned college visits in North Carolina. Due to a rescheduling fee for her family’s plane tickets and a non-refundable hotel, she had no choice but to continue with her original plans.
   ”Now I’m going to be missing two more days of school, which is very stressful, because that means I’m behind on eight classes for two days,” she said.
   For students participating in the Colmar-Princeton exchange program, two more days of assignments were tacked on to their already long list of days to be spent away from PHS.
   Jacob Middlekauff ‘15, a student on the trip, said, “The storm has increased the stress of our group on the whole because it has added a significant amount of work. There isn’t a lot of time to sit back and study in the exchange program. The seniors in particular are stressed because many are simultaneously working on and thinking about their apps.”
   With an entire week off, faculty and students alike also voiced concern about having enough time to complete assignments before the end of the first quarter, which was previously Nov. 14. However, that was remedied as soon as school reconvened on Monday, Nov. 5.
   ”I’ve spoken with teachers and supervisors and touched base with Student Council on Monday,” said Mr. Snyder. “We finalized and extended the end of the quarter until Monday, Nov.19, which essentially takes into account the days we missed and the two we’re making up this week, time to get projects done, assignments done.”
   For seniors, this extension was important for their first quarter grades that colleges will see.
   ”I’m glad the quarter was extended,” said Matthew Ko ‘13. “Without the extra time, my English teacher may not have been able to grade our last in-class essay before the original deadline.”
   Still, another consequence of the five missed days stems from the fact that the AP testing schedule remains unchanged. With nationwide testing occurring during the first two weeks of May, provisions are not set aside to accommodate emergency school closings.
   Timothy Campbell, an AP U.S. History and AP Government and Politics teacher, said, “As AP teachers, we have a set deadline when we need to be finished. When you take away five [days] all at once, it sets us back quite a bit. We have a snow day here or there every year, but to have an entire week wiped away from your schedule, it takes some rearranging to get where we need to be by May.”
   Though the storm has proven problematic in more ways than one, Mr. Campbell is optimistic about working around unpredictable weather.
   ”I can eliminate some things; I can change some things. It’s not insurmountable, and it’s part of my job,” he said. “We’ll get used to it. We’ll make do.”
   Elena Wu-Yan is a sophomore and Jane Dai a senior at Princeton High School.