Soph-Frosh                              Junior                                       Senior

Friday

Soph-Frosh                              Junior                                        Senior

Saturday

Soph-Frosh                              Junior                                          Senior

Khaytman said he was very frustrated by the behavior of the policeman, who berated him and took about half an hour to write the ticket.

MTA rules of conduct state that riders will receive a fine up to 100 dollars for occupying more than one seat or placing their feet on a seat. However, Khaytman feels that his fine was unwarranted because there were only four other people in the subway car when he propped his feet on the edge of the seat, and his feet were not dirtying the seat because they were only placed on the edge of it, not on top of it.

He said he was given the fine because the policeman saw him as an easy target. “We [victimized New York City residents] should not be the city’s source of income.”

In the New York Post article “Oh, sit! $50 for feet on a seat,” published on Tuesday, February 16, Khaytman’s mother, Izabella Medvinsky, said, “He didn’t do anything illegally. It’s not like it was a rush-hour train. It’s ridiculous.”

Khaytman sent a letter to the New York City Transit Authority (NYCTA) during Mid-Winter Break to contest the charges, and received a letter dismissing the fine on Saturday, March 6. “I’m guessing they just didn’t want bad press,” Khaytman said.

The MTA and NYCTA declined to comment.

According to the JNF Web site, the organization was founded in 1901 to collect money to purchase land to form a Jewish state, which did not exist at the time. Since Israel’s founding in 1948, it has helped the young nation with environmental protection, water conservation, community development and education. As part of its environmental efforts, it has planted about 240 million trees and built hundreds of reservoirs and dams.

Bierig is very supportive of what the organization has accomplished. “Israel once was a desert land and now it’s blooming with the trees. It’s to beautify the country,” she said.

Depending on the amount of money they donate, people can sponsor any number of small saplings that the JNF plants throughout Israel. The organization has a database matching donors with the trees they have subsidized so that people can easily visit them.

Though the trees are planted over 5,000 miles away from Stuyvesant, the JNF provides those being honored with a tangible token for the donation. “You give a donation and then they send a card to the person telling them that a relative that passed away has been memorialized,” Bierig said. “In this case, he [Rosen] got one big certificate, which was for the orchard of a certain group of trees, and another for the money that we collected.”

Bierig believed it would be appropriate to donate trees in Israel since Rosen and his father were both Zionists. She saw the donation as an opportunity for people who knew Rosen to do something that would be meaningful for him.

Bierig hopes this will help Rosen cope with the loss of his father. “It means so much,” she said. “When you lose somebody and somebody just acknowledges your pain and your loss.”

ExploraVision is an annual science competition that encourages teams of two to four students in grades ranging from kindergarten to twelfth to use science and creativity to formulate a potential innovation or invention that could be made possible using future technology. All students enrolled in the Honors Chemistry (SC2H) course at Stuyvesant are required to submit a project to ExploraVision.

Chemistry teacher Dr. Zhen-Chuan Li coached the team of Fan, Lee, Yen and Zhang, and biology teacher Dr. Jonathan Gastel mentored them. Their team is one of only 16 teams still remaining in the competition nationwide.

Each student received a Toshiba-branded product, and the team received a laptop for the school as an award for proceeding to the national level of the competition. National competitors will have to create a website and video explaining their project’s ideas. Winners of the competition will be announced on Friday, April 30.

The team’s project was titled “I-CEE: IKVAV-Scaffold Center-Surround Eyesight Enhancement.” Their proposed invention, known as I-CEE, is essentially a bionic eye that is meant to treat poor eyesight resulting from retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular disease—diseases which both affect the retina. The device contains a chip that uses a filter and photovoltaic cells to detect light and color. The photovoltaic cells are mounted on a scaffold created using the IKVAV peptide that ultimately sends information about light to the brain to effectively mimic human sight.

Fan attributes part of the team’s success to its coach and mentor. “The teachers have been helpful,” Fan said.  “Dr. Gastel is really cool and bounces ideas off, which guides us in the right direction.”

“They should win the whole thing,” Dr. Gastel said.  “I feel they did a great job and worked very hard.  It’s impressive because they are going against some older teams, like teams with juniors, so they have done really well so far.”

Though Dr. Gastel is confident in the team, Zhang is wary about how much further they will proceed. “I’m worried about the other teams. They’re doing similar topics on sight,” she said. “We’re going against schools that made it past nationals last year.”

However, Fan is satisfied with how far the team has already come. “Our original goal was to get to the regionals, so we are happy we made it,” Fan said.  “I’m glad it’s a group collaboration because each of us brought different aspects to the project. We have worked really hard, but it’s worth it.”

During the fall semester of the 2009-2010 school year, the workshop was held every other Monday, when the participating students had a science free period. Roughly 30 students, all of whom received at least two 85’s or below on their intermediate school report cards, were required to attend the workshop.

The workshop was designed and implemented by the inquiry team, a group of teachers and counselors who cooperate in order to develop possible school improvements. The inquiry team is part of the New York City Department of Education’s Children First Intensive Program—a professional development program designed to help schools close existing achievement gaps. The workshop was developed after members of the inquiry team noticed a dearth of participation in other tutoring programs.

“We’ve tried in the past to encourage students to go to tutoring, but nobody wants to stay after school. That’s why the workshop [class] is during 9th period,” inquiry team member and guidance counselor Jay Biegelson said.

Senior and ARISTA—Stuyvesant’s chapter of the National Honor Society—Co-Vice President of Tutoring Kashyap Rajagopal agreed. “The biggest issue we have is getting students to come,” he said.

The newly created class is held daily in room 615A.  Every Monday, a department head gives a presentation on his or her subject area, discussing note taking, study skills, time management and test taking tips. For the rest of the week, ARISTA tutors assist students in their problem areas, either in small groups or individually. The class’s focus is to help students develop better studying habits.

“By texting and going on Facebook, much of the time students spend is not efficient. I believe that every student can benefit from this new workshop,” inquiry team member and English teacher Holly Weiss said.

To ensure that they benefit from the class, students create study folders containing study guides and outlined notes. The guidance counselors collect and review the folders every Monday, checking for required material.

Both ARISTA tutors and students had positive reactions to the new class.

“There was a time when the class got to ask older students questions for just about anything and it was really helpful when they explained things to us,” participating freshman Michelle Chang said. “I told myself to start improving my grades when the first semester ended. So when I was put into this class during the second semester, I thought it would help if I received some tips for studying better. It’s been good overall.”

“The teachers are helpful,” participating freshman Michael Nguyen said. “I have time to study now and concentrate.”

“Even if I’m helping a student who has a different teacher than I had, I still try to help him or her to the best of my ability,” junior and ARISTA member Jasmine Wong said.

In light of the class’s success thus-far, the inquiry team hopes, in future years, to expand Accelerated Studies to include all incoming freshmen.

Six Stuyvesant team members qualified for the speech competitions and two qualified for debate. The qualifying team members are seniors Valeriya Tsitron, Anna Gordan, Sandesh Kataria and Claire Littlefield, as well as juniors Omika Jikaria, Rebecca Temkin, Jin Rim and Jaimie Meyers. In addition, a debate alternate—junior Lea Beltramino—qualified, and will compete should a spot open up at the competition.

The speech and debate team as a whole also won the Sweepstakes Award for both top overall performance in the tournament and the team’s excellence throughout the year.

Qualifying team members are hopeful about their chances on the national stage. “We’re looking forward to it but we don’t know what to expect since it’s our [mine and Valeriya Tsitron’s] first time at nationals,” Jikaria said.

On Saturday, March 6, the team participated in a qualifier tournament for the Catholic Forensic League (CFL). Students who placed in the top six positions advanced to the national CFL tournament, which will be held in Omaha, Nebraska over Memorial Day weekend.

Twenty-three team members qualified. The qualifying team members for debate are: sophomores Jong Lee, Sam Saskin, Liam Downs-Tepper; juniors Lalita Maraj and Daniel Frankel, as well as seniors Gordon, Kataria, and Sahil Goswami. The qualifying team members for speech are sophomores Suprita Datta, Kristina Mani; juniors Jikaria, Kouzmanoff, Temkin, Rim, Meyers, Simon Ayzman and Edwin Yung, as well as seniors Littlefield, Tsitron, Singha Hon, Chelsea Grant, Joseph Puma and Kashyap Rajagopal.

The team also won the Sweepstakes Award for the tournament. “It’s been a pretty remarkable year,” Littlefield said.

Currently, high school students who live one and a half or more miles away from school qualify for full-fare MetroCards to cover transportation costs. Students in lower grades receive MetroCards under different qualification requirements based on the distance they live from the school. However, due to New York State’s and the MTA’s decreased budgets, “the 584,000 city students who receive free or half-fare MetroCards [will] all receive half-fare cards beginning next September. In September 2011, they [will] pay full fares,” according to The New York Times article “Students See Hard Future if Free Fares Are Ended,” published on Thursday, December 17.

“Our testimony went well. We brought all the MetroCards and displayed a few hundred of them on a board and brought a box with the rest,” NYCSU member and Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts senior Toni Bruno said. “It seemed well-received.”

The NYCSU is an entirely student-run union currently including about 15 student members from public schools across New York City, including Bard High School Early College, The Beacon School, Brooklyn Technical High School, LaGuardia High School, Hunter College High School and Stuyvesant High School. Since its founding in 2006, the union has been involved in protests against the cell phone ban and education budget cuts, organized numerous events for high school student governments to collaborate and brainstorm ideas about how to better themselves, organized an event to inform students about future possibilities other than being recruited for the military and helped edit the student surveys used by New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein to determine schools’ report card grades.

“What happens is, a lot of the time, there are a lot of huge decisions being made and often it just changes a tiny thing, but it affects us [students] in a huge way,” NYCSU member and Bard High School Early College junior Dominic Veconi said. “New York City public school students have no say in these decisions, so that’s what the NYC Student Union’s goal is.”

NYCSU members’ outrage against the elimination of student MetroCards prompted them to organize the protest.

“It’s approximately a thousand dollars a year we’re going to have to spend. When did public education become so expensive?” NYCSU member and Brooklyn Technical High School junior Rebecca Morofsky said. “Students do have a voice and we need to take action because if we don’t, then they are just going to put more blows on our education and stomp all over us.”

NYCSU began planning the protest in late January. They spread awareness about the expired MetroCard collection through the NYCSU website and blog and a Facebook group.

According to NYCSU members, the decision to collect expired MetroCards and present them at the MTA hearing was made because it was both a convenient and effective way to make the voices of public school students heard to the MTA, state legislature, Governor David Paterson, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others.

“Right now it’s a lot easier to see students as a statistics, as a figure that can be cut from a budget, but when you read about the struggles that people are having, and what this is really going to do to them, it makes it a lot harder to say, ‘Oh, we’ll take that out, no big deal,’” NYCSU member and Brooklyn Technical High School junior Lucas Johnson said.

“It’s really a symbolic action to bring students together,” NYCSU member and LaGuardia High School senior Toni Bruno said. “Not that many different people from different schools connect that much. This kind of unity is what’s really important, more than anything.”

Sophomore Tong Wan, who organized the collection of expired MetroCards at Stuyvesant, amassed 840 MetroCards after collecting on the second floor on Monday, February 8, Tuesday, February 9, and Thursday, February 11. Wan spread awareness about the collection through a Facebook group and flyers.

“NYCSU said they needed someone from each high school to help collect so I said I’d do it. This protest will let the MTA see how widely affected we are,” Wan said.

“We shouldn’t have to pay to come to school,” said sophomore Tarif Aznum, who helped with the collection of MetroCards during the school day at Stuyvesant. “Other people will realize that it’s not fair that we’re losing our MetroCards.”

“In many New York City public high schools there are a lot of middle and lower class kids who are going to have trouble paying for their MetroCards,” junior Abrar Rabbi said.

Students were unsure about whether the protest would make a significant difference.

“I don’t think it’ll do much,” junior Sam Rim said. “In order for them [the MTA] to listen we would have to do something more serious.”

“I’m not sure that it [the protest] will do much, but it shows that we’re at least making an effort to stop it,” sophomore Jennifer Zhao said. “It is important because it helps increase awareness about what the MTA is actually doing to the students.”

Students received the results of their performances on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) on Friday, February 5 and decided on the school they wished to attend by Thursday, February 25. The minimum score that a student had to receive on the SHSAT in order to gain admission into Stuyvesant was 563, a slightly higher cutoff than that of last year, when the school accepted 989 students, 885 of whom chose to attend Stuyvesant.

Principal Stanley Teitel cites the current economic downturn as part of the reason that a greater percentage of students selected Stuyvesant as their high school of choice. “Last year, the declination rate dropped precipitously. I think that was a result of the economy. Since the economy has not substantially improved, that declination rate will hold,” he said. “Students who might normally attend private school might have had economic changes in their family, forcing them to go to public school.”

Coping with a large freshman class next year may pose a problem with limited solutions. International Federation of Teachers regulations state that no more than 34 students may be in a class and that teachers cannot teach more than five classes a day.

“We can’t make more classrooms. There’s no space,” Teitel said. “I could lengthen the school day, or reduce the number of classes individual students could take. There would be a period 11, maybe even a period 12.”

Other schools, such as Francis Lewis High School, accommodate a significant increase in student population by providing double-session education, in which half of the student population take morning classes and the other half take later classes. However, at the moment, Teitel plans to keep the school’s schedule at a maximum of 10 periods.

Some members of the Stuyvesant community are opposed to a larger incoming class than last year’s.

“With budget and classes being cut left and right, we don’t have the money for an even bigger freshman class,” junior Paula Tsvayg said.

“In past years, each grade had about 800 students and this additional increase troubles me,” English teacher Vito Bonsignore said. “I think the freshmen benefit greatly from smaller class size in an English class because their writing needs to be improved and/or polished.”

According to Bonsignore, while freshman English classes consisted of 25 to 30 students in the past, classes currently consist of 30 to 32 students.

“[The English teachers will] do a great job under any circumstances,” Assistant Principal English Eric Grossman said. “We are hopeful that next year we’ll be able to resume the Freshman Composition program and provide the range of English options that our students clamor for and deserve.”

Students are also worried that a greater student population will lower students’ level of academic performance.

“Not everyone that is accepted is fit or right to be here,” junior Fanny Mei said. “People who have low averages can get in because it’s only based on the standardized test, and it could be that they are not ready for the transition.”

However, some students and incoming freshmen reacted positively to a large incoming class.

“This is a great opportunity for many students to receive a great education that they wouldn’t be able to get in other schools,” junior Artem Sergeyenko said.

“I know Stuyvesant is very good academically, and I’m looking forward to coming here,” incoming freshman Vincent Wong said.

Donation boxes were set up near the bridge so that students could easily hand in their glasses. Any types of glasses were accepted, including bifocals and sunglasses, and no case was required. The donation boxes were then picked up by OneSight, which sorted and categorized them based on type and prescription.

So far, the drive has been successful, collecting around 30 pairs of glasses. “It was easy to donate, no hassle, no problem. The boxes made it convenient,” junior Luca Senise said.

The glasses drive was originally scheduled for Monday, March 1 to Friday, March 5, but was extended another week to allow for more donations.

OneSight uses the donations to set up two-week clinics in developing countries, where doctors and trained volunteers provide free eye exams and recycled eyewear to patients. They have run 155 clinics in 31 different developing countries to date. According to the OneSight Web site, the organization needs to collect and recycle 1.2 million pairs of used glasses to support 20 of their clinics each year.

Chin-Lee had the idea to start the Sights on Future club when she “thought about how many people [she] knew and saw wearing glasses around school,” she said. She noticed that many glasses get thrown out after they no longer fit, and realized that “there are others who need them and can’t get them, especially in the developing world,” she said. Chin-Lee proceeded to research non-profit eyeglass donation organizations and found what she wanted with OneSight because it is “one of the few organizations which has clinics and programs set up for eye care around the world,” Chin-Lee said.

The glasses drive will be Sights on the Future’s main event, but they plan to expand in the future. They want to continue their partnership with OneSight and raise awareness throughout the Stuyvesant community.