Features

It’s hard to believe that after 4 years each and every one of us seniors has survived 16 benchmark seasons. For a lot of us, we may have barely survived, but we still did. It’s a proud moment for all of us as we turn in our last benchmarks ever. So, in honor of this, we are going to remember some of the worst benchmarks we ever had. Maybe your partner didn’t do their part, maybe you forgot about a deadline, or maybe your entire project that you worked so hard on fell apart the night before. Whatever it was, it felt like the end of the world at the time, but now it’s kinda funny to look back on and think about. Let’s ask around and hear from the 2016 seniors about what their worst benchmark experience was.

Jesse Shuter
Freshmen year in geometry we were making a city layout and we set it up in squares. My square was labeled wrong so I put all of my drawings in the wrong square. The entire project ended up coming out wrong which made us turn it in late so that we could try to fix it. When we did turn it in we got a really bad grade on it and it was all my fault. That then led to a lot of late night phone calls from my group members screaming at me.

Ameer Forte
Junior year in physics class there was a group project with two other students. What made it bad was that I constantly tried reaching out to my group members to set up a plan and neither one of the people in my group would ever get back to me. Then there was like a week left and I had to do the entire project by myself. I was never put in that situation before where I had to take the lead so it really put things in perspective for me when I was being one of those students who left others to do work. I always really appreciated the leaders of all of my benchmark groups after that.

Brittany Atkinson
Junior Year in history class we had to do a video for a project. The person who was supposed to do the video never turned it in. But, not only did she not turn it in, she never told any of us that she didn’t turn it in. A month later we got a progress note that we never completed the benchmark and it was too late to finish it.

Mia Weathers-Fowler
Sophomore year in Spanish we had to do a benchmark that was a spanish web magazine. It was due at 8:15am and we got started putting it all together at about 8pm the night before with the mindset that it was an easy project that could be finished in no time. At 10pm when me and my two partners realized we were nowhere near done, two of us chugged a monster energy drink. Interesting decision. For like three hours we were at max efficiency. I have never worked so fast in my life. But then there was the crash. At around 1am I was exhausted, but we didn’t finish until like 3am. It was the two most difficult hours. We laugh about it now because it was a bonding experience. All of us were on facetime close to tears trying to write whole articles in Spanish.

No matter what the issue was, with 16 benchmark seasons and 1 for every class, we’re all bound to have a bad experience. We’re all going to stay up until 3am the night before it’s due or freak out on a few classmates. It’s inevitable. But, we all survived. It’s funny to read about these bad experiences now, but it definitely was not funny in the moment.

Aidan Williams, Staff Writer

I sat down with Cassie Hand, a junior and member of the Student Union, during their latest meeting. While I was not familiar with Student Union at all, I was curious as to what actions they were taking, and felt that it would be a good thing to share. It began with the story of Brian Burney.

Tell me Brian Burney’s story.

“Brian Burney, a student at Benjamin Franklin High School, was trying to use the bathroom in between classes. The bathrooms are locked, so he had to find an officer. He couldn’t find an officer to unlock the door for the bathroom, until after class started. Once class had already started, Jeffery Maciocha, one of the school district officers, found Brian in the halls.”

“Because he didn’t have a hall pass, he and the officer got into a verbal altercation, and it resulted in the officer assaulting him and forcefully restraining him.

“Another member of student union got it on video, and while the student had his phone taken away and the video deleted, the video was stored on the cloud. He got his phone back and was able to share it with the rest of student union. Because we had the video, it was proof for us that this was an issue that we needed to deal with.”

Where did you take it? It seems like the school district wasn’t taking this seriously.

“After taking it to the leaders of student union, we took it to the school district, and we got their attention through protest. There was also a School Reform Commission (SRC) meeting. While I wasn’t at the meeting, we were able to show them that this was an issue in many schools, especially the ones that are considered “bad” by the school district. We gave them some demands, including background checks on all officers in the school district, firing the officer who assaulted Brian Burney and moving budgeting from policing in schools to funding.

“We were able to have Officer Maciocha suspended, but not fired. However, there is now a date for all officers to submit background checks, and they will be suspended if the checks are not completed by this time.”

So, what is the SRC?

“The SRC has almost complete control over the budgeting in the school district. They have recently been closing schools, stating that they will close three schools a year for five years, and converting them into charter schools which they gain much more money from. However, we would like them to take some of the profits from the charter schools and use them as funds to improve public schools in the district.”