Hope for Palo Alto's High-Schoolers
Donation protected
My home city of Palo Alto, California—where I have taught high-school English for fifteen years, worked at the Children's Hospital, and written for the town newspaper—has in the past six years seen the deaths of ten of our high-schoolers by their own hands.
This ongoing tragedy, noted recently in the columns and letters of the New York Times, and the subject of a forthcoming article in The Atlantic, has made our children fearful of becoming freshmen at our town's two high schools (Gunn and Paly), is giving parents sleepless nights, has crowded the schedules of local therapists, and has brought pain and worry to everyone from teachers to police officers to railroad engineers.
While much ink has been spilled in the papers, voices raised at School Board meetings, and comments made on radio and TV, no useful epidemiological study has been undertaken—not even of the four youth suicides this past year—and our Superintendent, Board, and school principals have formed no comprehensive, principled plan to deal with the crisis.
High schools do not cause teenage despair, nor can they cure it; but there is much they can do to make it more bearable, more survivable. And so a Gunn High sophomore and I came together to form a community campaign—called Save the 2,008—to bring hope to our high-schoolers. Save the 2,008 is a toolkit of six measures—simple adjustments to the way the school is run— that would reduce the stress and depression, alienation and distrust, overwork and overcrowding that fill our teenagers' daily lives.
Named last November for the remaining number of students and faculty at our most hard-hit school, Save the 2,008 would:
1. Shrink classes to a friendlier size—strengthening ties between students and their classmates and teachers.
2. Moderate the amounts of nightly homework (through a confidential, student-teacher website).
3. Foster better consultation for AP course loads (to help fight sleep-deprivation).
4. Step between our kids and the schoolday siren song of their cellphones.
5. Slow the steady bombardment of grade-reporting.
6. Close out the climate of rampant cheating—the anxious atmosphere that kids must breathe, just to run the race of high school.
As we are about to embark on the second year of the campaign for Save the 2,008, our supporters include hundreds of parents, grandparents, teachers, LMFTs and psychologists, doctors and professors, artists and engineers and businesspeople, noted authors (Alfie Kohn and Julie Lythcott-Haims), an Academy Award winning documentarian and a chief health strategist for Google.
To convince local school officials of the wisdom of Save the 2,008 we need to build further public support and outcry through the use of newspaper space (to re-publish our Open Letter), brochures, billboards, banners, and all the public outreach we can muster. We collect donations on our website, but are coming up short for what will carry the day for us, this coming year.
And that is where you come in.
You can learn about us at savethe2008.com. You can also check us out at facebook.com/savethe2008. You can help us bring hope to our city's high-schoolers.
Sincerely,
Marc Vincenti
Gunn English Dept. (1995-2010)
Co-Founder, Save the 2,008
P.S. And the success of Save the 2,008 can become a model for other communities, around the country, that want a saner life for their schoolkids.
This ongoing tragedy, noted recently in the columns and letters of the New York Times, and the subject of a forthcoming article in The Atlantic, has made our children fearful of becoming freshmen at our town's two high schools (Gunn and Paly), is giving parents sleepless nights, has crowded the schedules of local therapists, and has brought pain and worry to everyone from teachers to police officers to railroad engineers.
While much ink has been spilled in the papers, voices raised at School Board meetings, and comments made on radio and TV, no useful epidemiological study has been undertaken—not even of the four youth suicides this past year—and our Superintendent, Board, and school principals have formed no comprehensive, principled plan to deal with the crisis.
High schools do not cause teenage despair, nor can they cure it; but there is much they can do to make it more bearable, more survivable. And so a Gunn High sophomore and I came together to form a community campaign—called Save the 2,008—to bring hope to our high-schoolers. Save the 2,008 is a toolkit of six measures—simple adjustments to the way the school is run— that would reduce the stress and depression, alienation and distrust, overwork and overcrowding that fill our teenagers' daily lives.
Named last November for the remaining number of students and faculty at our most hard-hit school, Save the 2,008 would:
1. Shrink classes to a friendlier size—strengthening ties between students and their classmates and teachers.
2. Moderate the amounts of nightly homework (through a confidential, student-teacher website).
3. Foster better consultation for AP course loads (to help fight sleep-deprivation).
4. Step between our kids and the schoolday siren song of their cellphones.
5. Slow the steady bombardment of grade-reporting.
6. Close out the climate of rampant cheating—the anxious atmosphere that kids must breathe, just to run the race of high school.
As we are about to embark on the second year of the campaign for Save the 2,008, our supporters include hundreds of parents, grandparents, teachers, LMFTs and psychologists, doctors and professors, artists and engineers and businesspeople, noted authors (Alfie Kohn and Julie Lythcott-Haims), an Academy Award winning documentarian and a chief health strategist for Google.
To convince local school officials of the wisdom of Save the 2,008 we need to build further public support and outcry through the use of newspaper space (to re-publish our Open Letter), brochures, billboards, banners, and all the public outreach we can muster. We collect donations on our website, but are coming up short for what will carry the day for us, this coming year.
And that is where you come in.
You can learn about us at savethe2008.com. You can also check us out at facebook.com/savethe2008. You can help us bring hope to our city's high-schoolers.
Sincerely,
Marc Vincenti
Gunn English Dept. (1995-2010)
Co-Founder, Save the 2,008
P.S. And the success of Save the 2,008 can become a model for other communities, around the country, that want a saner life for their schoolkids.
Organizer
Marc Vincenti
Organizer
Palo Alto, CA
