SLA Media

SLAMedia is a publication of the news for the Science Leadership Academy community. Writers come from the student body in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. We work in unison to create a functioning paper with biweekly postings on a variety of events.

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A Change of Pace

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Ryan Harris

Staff Writer 

Formally known as simply Simon Gratz High School, now under The Renaissance School Initiative.

 

Schools are certainly a mixed bag of ideas, all with the sole purpose of educating our youth. They can be good or bad and some may have a critical focus on subjects like agriculture, the military, science, and so on. Concerning the idea of being good and bad, what can constitute a “good” school? Or even a “bad” school? One can guess that a good school is when a majority of the student body, parents, teachers, and faculty feel safe and motivated to learn/teach. A “bad” school being the opposite of that.

 

What happens when the school can motivate its students to learn? When the teachers are giving up on the students? The school has a high rate of violence and truancy? The school’s integrity begins to falter, and begins to underperform amongst the other schools in the district.

 

In recent years, The School District of Philadelphia has discovered the schools where the student body are consistently coming up short. To counteract this, The District has created the Renaissance Schools Initiative, in which it is in it’s second year of implementing.

 

The Renaissance Initiative has even created a video explaining their plan, which can be viewed here.

 

It is backed by many different Turnaround Teams such as Mosaica Turnaround Partners, Mastery Charter Schools, and ASPIRA, Inc. of Pennsylvania.

 

Many of schools that are falling under the initiative are: Simon Gratz High School, Clymer Elementary School, and both Olney High Schools. Now what is this whole model trying to accomplish? In the simplest terms, The District wants turn the “bad” schools into something on the line of a Masterman or Central, schools who have a history of performing well.

 

With this even comes a name change: some may become a Promise Academy for example, or some may become a Mastery Charter School. But how do they compare to SLA for example?

 

Much like SLA each and every Renaissance School has an advisory, but the Renaissance schools have something called a SAC or school advisory council. Both also, try and give ways for their students to further their education: Renaissance School offering Saturday classes and SLA offering AP classes through The District.

 

All this is great, but how does student body fair? Given the schools previous history of underperforming, the student bodies aren’t going to do so well either.

 

“It’s a neighborhood school, so most everyone comes from this area. There were big problems with truancy, fights, and gang activity.”  stated Joshua Newman about Olney Charter High School, in a previously SLAM article.

 

Of course just because the schools themselves have been re-vamped, doesn’t mean that the students will quickly change as well. The problem students will stay the problem students. This could possibly be due to the fact that they used to attend a school where teachers simply gave up on them. One can only hope this change of pace with the Renaissance Schools can ease that problem.

 

 

Zombie Herman Attacks Advisories

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Mr. Herman's advisory poses. Photo by Ayanna Robinson.

By Alex Ringgold

Staff Writer

On October 31, SLA had a couple of students dressed up for Halloween in frightening, humorous, or just plain weird costumes. However, at the end of the day, the whole community was taken by surprise when a mob of zombies tore through the hallways and attacked several advisory meetings.

The mastermind behind the undead invasion? History and Digital Video Teacher Mr. Herman and his advisees.

Mr. Herman has a history of directing scary scenarios, as he has been involved with haunted houses and other horror-themed events since 2003. He is usually tasked with scaring older kids during these haunted houses, so his advisory dressing up as zombies on Halloween should not have come as a surprise.

Mr. Herman’s love of scary is not a recent thing. “I’ve always loved horror movies, but psychological horror movies,” he said. During his first year at SLA, he and a group of students worked on creating their own scary movie.

“We wanted to do something that was never done before,” Mr. Herman explained. “So a zombie outbreak starts in a high school because of the school lunch, and we wanted a heroine for our story, but the spin is that she’s half zombie and half human.”

He continued to add an even bigger spin. “When she is around zombies she feels like a human, like Blade, so she’s killing them and slaying them, but when she’s around humans she feels the urge, you know, to eat.”

Mr. Herman’s projects at school are only a small part of his experience with video and media. He’s been on production teams before and even doubles of certain films and shows, like Power Rangers. He was even a part of the stunt crew for the movie Star Trek: Insurrection.

In the movie, Mr. Herman played one of the inhabitants on a planet that was being invaded for its source of power. He was dressed in a brown sack-like costume and told to run across a bridge before it blew up as an effect for the movie.

As for his most recent role, many students were surprised and amused by the event. Junior Jenn Wright, one of the students who was “attacked” by the mob, and she had this to say when they shambled into her unexpecting advisory:

“At first I was like ‘What is going on, what are they trying to accomplish?’ I was just confused but then I was like, ‘Oh, okay this is what SLA does.'”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SLA Community Observes, Reflects on Occupy Philly

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By Bach Tong
Staff Writer

The phrase “We are the 99%” has become familiar to folks who travel by City Hall or pay attention to the local news. Occupy Philadelphia began on October 6th as part of a larger widespread movement started in New York City known as Occupy Wall Street.

Adbusters, a Canadian Magazine, used the term “Occupy Wall Street” in its July issue and called people to come and protest on September 17th. Over the last month, the movement has inspired a widespread response with more than 1500 locations globally. A general strike is called in cities across the country on Wednesday November 2d in response to the level of police brutality.

In Philadelphia, the Occupy group has consisted of a few hundred tents and individuals camped at Dilworth Plaza outside City Hall. For the SLA community, such a globally symbolic movement located only seven blocks away has been something interesting to explore.

Students have different opinions about the protests. Senior Michael Dea went down to City Hall with the SLA poetry club last Tuesday as a part of their club activity. “They were marching, protesting, not knowing what they want,” he commented about what he saw. “I don’t think that they are going to get much done.”

Senior Gina Dukes said that she wants to “make people realize that it is more to the movement than what the media is portraying”. She thinks that the movement is organized and people “should actually visit so they can see for themselves what is going on”.

Dukes views the movement as positive because people are uniting to create changes in society. Yet she thinks that “Occupy Philly has barely made any progress” she commented “and the few times that I’ve visited, there has not been much action going on”.

History and Digital Video Teacher Doug Herman has a different viewpoint. “Their presence is necessary because it is a reminder that this world still has two super powers- America and public opinion.”

Mr. Herman has been taking pictures and involved in it since the first day of Occupy. “I think the most common thing that has been said against the Occupy events is that they don’t have any unification,” Mr. Herman commented, “and that there is extreme confusion as to what they are actually trying to achieve.”

Mr. Herman is not the only teacher who has engaged with the protests and their implications. Ms. Rami has her class journal prompts regarding this topic in her Reading, Writing, and Rising Up, which critiques media and their portrayals of different issues.

For a long run, Dea thinks that people should be more specific in what they are demanding. “If I could get people to listen, I’d create a unifying message targeting a specific issue at a time”, he said.

Despite the mixed opinions that students have, Occupy Philadelphia and the Occupy movement in general have definitely gotten SLA’s attention. Thanks to SLA’s location and the school’s commitment to inquiry, students have a chance to have conversations int heir classrooms about what is happening and whether they want to be involved.

SLA Ponders Possibility of A New Home

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By Alex Ringgold
Staff Writer
To most students at SLA, the soul of their school exists with the people in the community–teacher, students, and the larger community.

However, none of this would exist if the school did not have an actual building. Most students don’t know about the history of how SLA was built–and how the current home of the school, at 55 N. 22nd street, could be a temporary one.

Although SLA opened its doors to students in the fall of 2006, School District of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Management negotiated the lease for the school in 2005. This lease was set for ten years and is not paid for by the capital of the state. The lease, like a rent, is paid by the operational funds of the school. This means that the funds used to make sure students have supplies, tools, and programs to better education are also being used to pay the lease, unlike most other schools, where the building is owned by the School District.

Chris Lehmann, the founder and principal of SLA, acknowledges that this is a difficult situation. “A perfect world is a school paid with capital funds so all operating funds go to the kids and education.”

The lease was enacted before Lehmann was hired, so he has no power over the matter, the only thing he can do is make sure his needs are met that may appear in the building.

Currently SLA is in its seventh year in the current building. With the lease expiring in three short years, the questions is rapidly approaching: What is the future home of SLA?

Lehmann described three possibilities.

The first would be that the school would have to vacate the building — but only to move to a new school built specifically for Science Leadership Academy. The disadvantage to this plan is that it would cost the School District approximately $40 million dollars, which is cheap in the long run but very expensive at the moment, due to budget cuts and the financial problems the School District and Philadelphia is facing.

The second possibility is that SLA renews the lease or negotiate an entirely new lease, but again. The drawback here would be the school using its operational funds to maintain the lease.

The third possibility that could happen is that SLA moves to a building that once housed a high school. The only disadvantages would be that SLA has very specific needs for its building — such as a high number outlets for laptop chargers, and full science lab facilities — that help it run effectively. Even an old school building could require major renovations.

How do the students feel about this? Sophomore DeShawn McLeod, whose brother Jerome graduated two years ago with the first class of SLA, feels deeply connected to the current school space. “It’s a home, there’s so many places that we’ve found to make a home in this building. I feel like we’ve settled down into a second home.”

McLeod also responded about the possibility of the school being relocated and how it will affected the community. “It will affect the people who have been here and the history we have created, especially the freshmen.”

Although the SLA community would love to have a new facility to call their own, this is an unlikely hope in the current School District climate. Currently SDP is seeking to close several schools in the city, not open new ones. Lehmann acknowledges this challenge. “Figuring out how to fill all the needs of the schools in the district, and how to balance that, it is a challenging thing.”

No matter what happens, there is only one outcome that the populace of the school looks forward to: the future in which the SLA community has a place to learn, create, and lead.