PAGE 4 | N OVEMBER 21, 2001
THE LIGHTNING PRESS
EDITORIAL
Pledging
to Paper
Letter to the Editor
Show Teachers the Money!
by Joe Filipas
Staff Columnist
_______________________________________________
Let me begin by stating this: I am an American citizen. I love and respect this nation,
and I am willing to make any sacrifice to protect it. I am proud to be an American.
Naturally, I was horrified the morning of
September 11th when I returned to class with
a forgotten folder to see the World Trade
Center Towers in flames. I was outraged. I
was bewildered. I was scared for the future
of our nation.
Now, two months after the attacks, I feel
that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is very
appropriate. However, I believe that our
method is highly questionable.
I think that I speak for most of the student
body and the staff when I state that reciting
the Pledge of Allegiance to a picture of a flag
on a television set is disturbing. The Pledge
is a speech directed towards a symbol of our
nation, its government, and its ideals. Promising your dedication to protecting and upholding those ideals to a television feels
downright perverse.
I have not given the pledge to the TV in
over a week. Rather, I am now giving my
word to a 5x7 paper model of the flag of the
United States of America. Needless to say,
this does not feel much better.
I am not proposing that our school should
purchase a flag for every classroom. Maybe
it would be possible to furnish every cluster
with a flag that could be used for the pledge.
Maybe a giant flag could be posted in the
fields outside of the academic wing. Maybe
we should not be asked to say the Pledge
unless we have a flag.
Perhaps we should make do with what we
have.
I have unfailingly recited the Pledge since
this movement began, despite my misgivings.
Even though the announcements say that
students should respect the choices of others in either participating or observing, I feel
it is important to say this: in these times of
patriotism and uncertainty, if you are an
American citizen, either born or naturalized,
and you are given the option to say the
Pledge of Allegiance in any form, you should
participate. If you don’t, even though others are supposed to respect that decision, it
looks very, very bad. I am frustrated by those
who find enjoyment by Refusing To Conform
With Society . If you think that you are cool
by Speaking Out and Being Different, and
you refuse to pledge your allegiance to a
nation that protects your right to do so, you
are an ignorant fool. If life has taught me
anything, it is that it’s okay to think in your
own way and to be different, but that sometimes it is more important to let the Status
Quo take priority.
I will continue to say the Pledge of Allegiance, be it to a piece of paper, a television,
or an actual flag, because I love, respect, and
believe in the United States. God bless
America.
To the editor:
Many of us breathed a sigh of relief when we heard the levy passed in District 196, and while it is a relief, it is only one battle in a war.
We’ve saved our schools from further budget cuts, but what about those who really make schools what they are, what about our
educators? Children of the near future will soon begin to search for their place in the world. They will choose from a wide spectrum of
careers; however, children and parents alike will realize that the many faces of our valuable educators are disappearing, due to the low and
non-competitive salaries our district provides. This is not merely a concern for the teachers or the school board, but rather the entire
community. The community needs to understand what the situation is, the reasons behind the situation, and what can be done about it.
From 1998 to 2000, five percent of the teachers in District 196 have resigned. Last year alone, one hundred and twenty-eight teachers
left. The results of a survey showed that the majority of these cases were because of the low salaries offered in District 196. In the Lake
Conference, District 196 ranks seven out of twelve in first year teacher salaries. Our first year teachers, as well as our twenty-fifth year
teachers with master’s degrees rank last in the Lake Conference. District 196’s teacher salaries are in the forty-second percentile of a Lake
Conference that ranks low from a national perspective. In 1990 the average Minnesota teacher salary of $32,190 was above the U.S.
average by $829, but now the average salary of $40,577 is $2,321 below the national average. Many wonder why teachers don’t get paid
more.
The problem is simply that the school board does not have the money. District 196 ranks forty-seventh out of forty-eight in both
revenue and expenditures among the forty-eight metropolitan school districts. Dakota County does not suffer from lack of revenue. In
fact, Dakota County is ranked among the top fifty wealthiest communities in the nation. So why don’t teachers see any of this profit?
Compared to other poorer communities we spend one thousand dollars less per student. Where do the priorities of the residents in the
District 196 lie? By not paying our teachers competitively we are telling them that they are not valuable and that they are not needed. We
are telling our children that an education and the educator are not valuable. We are encouraging the teacher deficit that has been predicted
by many.
Minnesota needs more teachers, but there aren’t any to be found. The teaching profession simply is not viewed as a profitable career.
The average wage for a Minnesotan has increased by 40.45% in the last ten years. The average wage for teachers has increased only
21.57% in the last ten years. Teachers who have to support their families are beginning to look for more practical ways of earning a living,
which is depriving the state of the basic building block for any career.
Is it truly because there isn’t enough money in the district, or do they just misuse it? The teacher’s salaries in District 196 are part of a
collective bargaining process. The Dakota County United Educators (DCUE) has teacher representatives, two school board members, and
two principal representatives that participate in negotiations. When the negotiation process has been completed the DCUE takes the
negotiated contract for a vote from the teachers to ratify it. Once the contract is ratified the district the district administration puts the
contract before the school board to get a vote of approval. This method is called the Interest Based Collective Bargaining (IBCB). From
the teacher and school board perspective this method gives each party fifty percent of the say in creating salaries. All of the parties
involved believe that IBCB is a fair system and can’t be blamed for the uncompetitive wages.
How does a community find itself in this predicament? Information is the key to this modern society. Entire agencies are dedicated to
gathering information. The problem is that there are so many points of view within the school board and community that the people have
received a plethora of information. The average resident no longer knows what to believe or who to trust. It is much easier to simply forget
that any problem exists, than to sift through all of the data. Though this may be a convenient solution for some, we as high school
students believe that the loss of teachers is an issue that must be addressed now. If all the pizza parlors were to suddenly drop of the face
of the earth, only the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would truly suffer. Yet, if the teaching population continues to decline, the future of
today’s children does not appear to be bright by any means.
The last teacher settlement has been referred to as a step in making salaries more competitive. What else can we do? We need to be
willing to give the teachers the emotional, social, and fiscal support they need to remain in our district. We can retain many of our fine
educators if we are willing to give a little more financially to our schools. It is not the teachers we are paying for, but the future. If we do
not pay now, we will pay later as our children fail to become effective leaders. It is time to take a look at how we can retain our educators
and give our children the education they deserve.
From Tara Carlson, Anthony Dann, Lindsey Freidlund, Katie Soens-Adams, Chris Steinbarger
THE LIGHTNING PRESS
Boys
are
Weenies
by Sam Lee and Megan Murphy
Lightning Editors
___________________________________________________________
“Will you go to the dance with me?” This
is a question often heard about a month prior
to most major dances. But who is the one
doing the asking now? Lately we’ve noticed
an interesting trend in which the table has
turned from the guys to the girls taking charge
of their date prospects.
Now you might say that in light of Sadie’s
having taken place last weekend that of course
the girls are going to be the ones popping this
nerve-wracking question. However, we’ve
seen this growing trend during the past few
years at Eastview – and not just in November.
Many girls are often the ones who finally take
charge and ask or they end up setting their
girlfriends up with dates.
What’s wrong with our guys?! Have they
become, according to senior Jessie Gehrke
“weenies”?! Or have the guys all received
concussions in recent years and lost the ability to form this specific question? It is one of
life’s mysteries that us girls will never understand.
NOVEMBER 21, 200| PAGE 5
EDITORIAL
The Pressure of Perfection
by Laura Anderson
Editorial Editor
_________________________________________________________
Life isn’t about your grades, athletic
talent, or the number of co-curricular activities you’re in. All of these things are
great, but at the end of your lifetime will
that really matter anymore? When you’re
eighty no one’s going to care if you were
the football captain, valedictorian, or
beauty queen when you were seventeen,
but they will care about how you treat
others and your attitude towards life.
Talents and abilities are wonderful and
necessary for the enjoyment of life, but
the focus on these for personal acceptance and success are devastating. Everyone has been blessed with a talent
and it should never be taken for granted,
but it becomes a problem when who you
are is defined by what you can do. Not
everyone can be the best at what society
views as “impressive”, but the pressure
to perform creates a terrible stress on
today’s teen. American society values
students who have a 4.0 with all advanced classes, have a spot on a varsity
team, play an instrument in the top band
(1st chair of course), are the president of
at least two clubs, volunteer at three organizations, and get a 35 on the ACT.
While accomplishments like these are
outstanding, shouldn’t who you are be
defined by your character and how you
interact with and treat other people?
Why should today’s teen strive to be
perfect at everything when the goal is
only to please others and make them-
selves look good? With this attitude a student will never be perfect enough to truly be
happy with who they really are aside from
what they can do. Activities and good performance are not bad
by any means, but if the motivation is not
from one’s self, then the accomplishments will
never be satisfying. The life of a teenager
should not be a stressful and chaotic mess of
pressure and activities, but a time of socializing and a slow breakthrough to the real world
before college. It should be expected that a
student try their best in school and earn good
grades and participate, but the pressure to be
in everything and do everything and be perfect at everything is what is unhealthy. Why
do students allow themselves to be taken in
by this demand for perfection and greatness?
Many students probably believe that the
only way to get into that prestigious college
is to be involved, but there comes a point
when someone can be overly involved. According to Careers and Colleges magazine in
an article entitled “Stressed for Success”,
Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of admissions
at Harvard , expressed her concern about the
quest students have for a long list of activities. She thinks that these activities are taking away from a student’s family life as well
as stressing them out to unhealthy levels. She
and other admission counselors are asking
that students slow down from the credentialbuilding process so they don’t burn out.
McGrath also says that colleges aren’t looking at who’s the busiest. She tells students
to find out what they love and go after it with
a lot of energy because it’s not the quantity of activities, but the quality.
In the end, character quality will outshine any talent or ability anyway. So
maybe instead of concentrating on personal gain and achievement, students
should focus on becoming a person of quality character. No matter how great
someone’s talent may be, if their personality stinks, the talent won’t matter anymore.
No one wants to work with or be around
someone who is selfish, conceited, rude,
and focused on being the best at everything. Talents and abilities will only get a
person so far, their character will have to
carry them rest of the way.
So now it’s the time to be realistic, is it
worth a student’s teen years to constantly
be worried about performing for the rest of
society? Do they really need to be in seven
AP classes and have three activities after
school? Wouldn’t it be better if they had
time to go home and be a normal kid and
watch TV or hang out? Teenagers are still
“kids” and they need to enjoy life without
the unnecessary stress of performing for
the approval of others. It is true that you
will get far in life by doing well in school or
excelling in a sport, but in the end this will
all fade away and your character will remain. Society and schools should focus
more on the character qualities of students
and how they treat others rather than what
they can do, because in the end character
will prevail.
May I Please Go to the Bathroom?
by Abby Ries, Megan Saatkamp,
Hilary Maskas, Manal Al-Hassen,
and Jon Marple
Lightning Reporters
____________________________________________________
High school, a time of preparation for college. College equals freedom; no parents, no
curfew, and you can go to the bathroom without a pass. Think about it, the majority of
students can drive, and some can help pick
the leaders of our country, yet students are
not allowed to go to the bathroom without
carrying around that little orange piece of paper. However, the reality is that passes are
instituted for specific reasons to achieve certain goals, but the achievement of these goals
seem to be undercut by the perception and
enforcement of passes at Eastview High
School.
Students often think that they are young
adults perfectly capable of going to the bathroom and coming back to class on their own,
yet they have to get permission from a teacher
and then use a pass, which, to them, seems
foolish. It turns out that even if the administration agreed with this view point they
wouldn’t be allowed to get rid of passes because truancy laws prohibit them from doing
so. Truancy, is in essence skipping class, and
students are bound, by law, to attend certain
number of classes. Without passes there is
no way to check whether a student is authorized to be out of class, therefore the truancy
laws are harder to uphold. Also it has been
proven discipline prevents truancy and passes
provide this discipline, by having a certain
set of rules that need to be followed wherever
a student goes in EVHS. Although law mandates passes, this is not the sole reasoning
for their existence. In interviews with administrators and through distribution of 50 surveys to teachers it was established that the
school is trying to create an environment that
is most conducive to learning. One reasons
for passes is they allow a way to distinguish symbol that the administrators don’t trust
between Eastview High School students and them, and educators do not make much of an
other people who shouldn’t necessarily be effort to rectify this perception. Also, from
in the building. Passes also help regulate collected surveys, passes are not taken seriactivities which have the potential to be det- ously, by both students and educators, berimental to the whole of EVHS, because stu- cause the pass policies are not enforced.
dent whereabouts are known. The most im- After sending out 100 student surveys in addition to the
portant
previously
reason for
mentioned
passes, as
teacher surasserted
veys it was
by the adclear from reministrasponses that
tion, is
both
stut h a t
dents and
passes
teachers feel
provide
passes send
authorizathe message
tion to be
that students
out
of
are
not
class and
trusted by
without
the adminispasses it
tration. The
would be
student sureasier for
veys seemed
students
to come to a
to
skip
consensus
classes
that
they
and, first
don’t really
violating
have a drivtruancy
ing force to
laws and
Joe Filipas in the bathroom-without his pass!
show their resecondly
sponsibility
the best
because
the
administration
doesn’t
trust them
education of students is not being provided.
anyway,
and
was
already
expecting
them to
The previously mentioned reasons for
passes are certainly valid arguments, but demonstrate a lack of responsibility. Althese objectives set forth by the administra- though this seems to be a pretty extreme extion are not being achieved because of the ample, it reflects the bigger idea, if the stuway passes are perceived and how they are dents were given more freedoms they would
prove to be responsible because they don’t
enforced.
Perception of passes refers to how passes want those freedoms taken away. Since stuare viewed by both the students and faculty dents only see the lack of trust message they
at EVHS. The students see the passes as a do not see the real objectives of the administration.
Secondly, the administration says the main
reason for passes is to make sure everyone
is where they need to be, but the enforcement of the pass policy contradicts this very
idea. Administrators and teachers are supposed to check passes of students who are
wandering hallways during class time, but it
has been often recognized that this is not
the case. Just to affirm this assertion, three
students walked around school for thirty five minutes, and in this time span were
passed by a total of 23 faculty mem bers.
They were stopped once, by the teacher who
sits at the front door during fourth hour, but
this was only after he had been passed twice
before. This “experiment” clearly shows the
pass policy is not properly enforced, therefore is directly contradictory to the goal set
by the administration.
A single group is not to blame for the resentment toward passes, but rather it is the
fault of the community of Eastview. Therefore, all people in Eastview have a responsibility to be more receptive to passes. Teachers should explain to the students why
passes are used at EVHS. Students need to
be more open minded to these reasons and
acknowledge the fact that some students can
not take responsibility to be in class, thus
passes have a place in a school. Also if teachers and administrators want to achieve their
main objective with passes they have a duty
to better enforce the pass policy. If the policy
is taken more seriously it will, in turn, be taken
more seriously by the students. Everyone at
Eastview has an obligation to be more open
minded and learn the reasoning behind
relavant policies, and then to make sure the
goal set by that policy is achieved. Overall,
the benefits from carrying around a little orange pass outweigh the harms that could
occur to the school environment. However,
this is only true if that policy is enforced, or
else it’s just a waste of orange paper.