Make grad night safe for students
Do you know where your new graduate will be grad night?
Graduation time will soon to be upon us for our junior high and high schools throughout the valley. For our high school students, graduation is an end to four years of studying, midterms, final exams, rallies, assemblies, football games and school dances. Graduation day is a day of great relief, as students take their next step into adulthood and start a new phase of their life.
Graduation day can also be a day of tragedy, as our youth take to their cars with joy in their hearts and a bottle of alcohol in their hand, projecting 4,000 pounds of metal over Highway 17, and in an instant, a carload of good students find their lives coming to an abrupt end as their car stops suddenly against a tree. Or as they come home from an unsupervised private grad night party, laced with alcohol and drugs, bleary-eyed, ending four years of high school with an overdose, an unwanted pregnancy or death. What a tragic waste of our most valuable resources. This does not have to be.
The parents of high school seniors throughout the valley have been working hard since September of last year to provide a safe and sane, drug- and alcohol-free grad night party for these wonderful youth. They can dance all night to their most popular DJ and win prizes such as mountain bikes, VCRs, CD players, TVs, cameras and camcorders, only to name a few. Some of our local high schools even give away a new car. There are games for everyone, food for all night and even a place to sleep if fatigue comes early. Your new grad will be in a well-supervised, safe area from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., not allowed to go home unless picked up by a parent or guardian.
Make graduation night a memory to be cherished and not a memory of despair. If money is tight, please contact your senior adviser of the high school or the Grad Night chairperson. At our high school, no student will be turned away. Scholarships are available for all those who have a need.
Know where your grads are graduation night. Parents, please encourage your new grad to attend the local high school grad night celebration.
Speaking for Fremont High School, I salute the parents of the Grad Night Committee of 1996 for making a difference in the lives of our new grads.
You will never know the good you have done the past eight months, but if we can save one life, that otherwise may have been lost, it is worth every ounce of work you have contributed. Thank you so much for your dedicated effort.
Tom Larsen
Grad Night Chairperson
Fremont High School
Teachers' demands are unreasonable
The May 1 issue notes that the Fremont Union High School District wants a three-year contract that will raise teacher salaries at a compound rate of between about 8 percent and 11 percent per year, with no apparent regard for merit. How many taxpayers in the district can look forward to such generous raises over the next three years?
Yet the teachers union is prepared to reject this as inadequate! It would seem that its priorities have only remote connection with parents' and taxpayers' desires to improve students' education.
R. A. Blais
Cupertino
District should have put students first
School bond issues have been rejected in many recent elections, particularly when two-thirds approval is required--as is the case with Sunnyvale Elementary School District's measure in the June 4 special election.
The district is asking for money to repair school buildings just as it moves its administrators into a new office building on which it spent more than $2 million.
We may wonder whether ignorance or arrogance inspired this obstacle to voter acceptance of an expensive bond measure. The Sunnyvale district's case would be far more persuasive if it had made do with modest office facilities--even portable buildings--in a determination to provide every available penny for the buildings that students use.
A responsible administration would not have put its convenience ahead of those students in spending our tax money. As these people sit in their new Iowa Avenue office building, they have reason to examine their priorities.
James E. Lincoln
Sunnyvale
This article appeared in the Sunnyvale Sun, May 22, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.