Gallery • 4 Photos

Vin Bhat

Students leave Gunn following the shelter-in-place mandate.

At 1:58 p.m. today, a message on the intercom instructed students to begin sheltering in place. This mandate lasted for one hour and 48 minutes, eventually lifted by an intercom announcement at 3:46 p.m.��

According to the , 1:51 p.m. calls reported a man with a gun and a 1:53 p.m. call reported a bomb threat, both near Georgia Avenue and Miranda Avenue. The City of Palo Alto has now that these calls were hoaxes — the first two, at 1:51 p.m., stated they had seen a teen boy carrying a rifle and two pipe bombs walking toward Gunn, and that a man in his twenties wearing body armor and carrying a rifle was approaching the school. The 1:53 p.m. call came from a man who said he was approaching Gunn with a bomb.��

This initial shelter-in-place announcement was reiterated at 2:01 p.m., emphasizing that the situation was not a drill. Two more announcements at 2:31 p.m. and 3:06 p.m. reminded students to keep sheltering.

At 2:15 p.m., Principal Dr. Wendy Stratton posted a Schoology update detailing that there was an unconfirmed threat on campus, and that the Palo Alto Police Department was present and partnering with admin to provide more updates.��

A , formerly known as Twitter, posted at 2:35 p.m. said that school officials had also instructed students to shelter in place at Fletcher Middle School as a precautionary measure. Police also confirmed that all students and staff on Gunn’s campus were safe.

At 2:48 p.m., staff members received an email from Stratton stating that students would be released from school at 3:50 p.m. and would be permitted to transport themselves home or be picked up by a parent. All after-school events, including athletics, were canceled. Parents received the same information via ParentSquare at 2:54 p.m., and students were notified via Schoology soon after.

At 3:09 p.m., PAPD noted in the same X thread that they had “uncovered no evidence to corroborate that any actual threat exists,” but that they would continue the shelter-in-place while investigating. Half an hour later, they announced the end of their search.

Police were still present on campus as students were dismissed. According to an officer who wished to remain anonymous due to the pending investigation, the lockdown and search went according to police and PAUSD protocol. However, there is still an open, criminal investigation. According to a 4:46 p.m. Schoology post from Stratton, a police presence will remain on campus throughout the week, and there will be additional staff members available at the Wellness Center.��

Police that Orinda’s Miramonte High School, located just east of Oakland, was also in lockdown as of 3 p.m., but police at Gunn stated that there was no known connection between the two incidents.

According to Gunn Safety Committee member Vin Bhat, Gunn’s safety committee will be convening after school on April 23, and the districtwide committee will be meeting on Wednesday, April 24. Gunn administrators said they could not comment until Tuesday, April 23.

According to Senior Construction Project Manager Mohammed Sedqi, workers were connecting the overflow for bioswales, or runoff channels, with a storm drain when they hit the main water line. To fix the leak, workers had to first drain out the water in the pipes and then put a patch over the break. After the pipes were “purged” of air bubbles, the line was functional again.��

Junior Hannah Kim realized the water supply had been shut off following a trip to the restroom during her Advanced Placement Statistics class.��

“Me and my friend went to the bathroom and we realized that some of the water in the toilets looked a little unclear, so we tried flushing them and they didn’t flush,” she said.��

By 12 p.m., three portable toilets had been placed near Spangenberg Theater and water bottles had been placed in the lunch lines in front of the Student Activities Center. According to PAUSD Director of Facilities and Construction Eric Holm, district officials picked up hand sinks from Fletcher Middle School and water from Costco for students to use. Thirty more portable toilets were ordered, but only arrived once the water had been turned on again.��

Around 1:30 p.m., water spouts on building walls turned on, and toilets around campus were flushed. According to PAUSD Maintenance Supervisor Ken Culp, this preliminary reopening of the water supply “purged” the emptied water lines of air, preventing the formation of air bubbles when students and staff finally used the facilities. Following this “purge,” the water lines were fully operational, and an announcement at 1:37 p.m. notified students that the water was back on.��

The restoration process took a little over two hours in total, occurring much more rapidly than in September 2021, when the main water line was hit during parking-lot construction. Holm noted that this project’s contractors, Sausal Corporation, were more prepared to deal with the situation than Redgwick Corporation, the contractor used for the parking-lot project: In 2021, students were sent home from school early while the construction team attempted to address the issue.��

Nevertheless, students —��including sophomore Rayla Chen — found the line break frustrating.��

“I just walked into the building bathroom during second period, and then all of a sudden, it said ‘out of order,’ and I didn’t know where else to go to go use the bathroom or fill up my water bottle, so that was a bit of a hassle,” she said.��

Moving forward, construction will continue as planned. According to PAUSD Operations Supervisor Brett Larson, preventative action is not necessary.��

“This is unforeseen, and that happens from time to time, and you can’t control the unforeseen,” he said.

—Written by Amann Mahajan. Additional reporting by Kaylee Cheng

According to Principal Dr. Wendy Stratton, the new evidence-based grading system will be based on that of Adlai Stevenson High School in Illinois, which focuses on students’ ability to improve skills over time. In the new four-point grading system, a student’s teacher determines a final course grade by reviewing the student’s assessments and considering any clear patterns of growth. Getting a score of four means that a student has exceeded mastery. Three is mastery, two is approaching mastery and one is having a fundamental understanding.

“It’s (about whether you can do) the skills to the level that we are asking,” Stratton said. “I think it’s a more transparent and straightforward system.”

The Gunn administration has formed an ad hoc committee with staff from various subjects to discuss the upcoming changes, which will occur over multiple years. According to Planning Team Lead Kathryn Catalano, Gunn will prioritize quality over speed and do everything possible to make the transition seamless. Catalano’s conservative projection is that, after a transition period, the final form will be launched in the next seven years. Specifics of the plan have yet to be discussed within the planning team.

For a smooth transition, Catalano says that support resources will be available for both teachers and students. Currently, multiple teachers are participating in a pilot program involving a few teachers from all departments to analyze the practicality of this new system.

“We’re encouraging teachers to jump into this with a teaching team rather than doing this by themselves because having a team anytime you’re trying to learn something new helps a lot,” she said.

According to Adlai Stevenson High School Principal Troy Gobble, the shift to evidence-based grading is necessary due to fundamental flaws in the status quo.

“There’s a problem with the way that we have graded for 100 years,” Gobble said in a video published by the school. “What we’ve done is forced students into a conversation that’s around collecting points. What we want to do is identify the essential learnings of the class — the fundamental standards that exist for the course.”

Catalano noted that the change at Gunn will place an emphasis on developing student autonomy and competence.

“It’s more of a philosophy shift,” Catalano said. “One of the big things with evidence-based grading and teaching is the focus on helping to develop student agency and spending time developing skills that are going to be meaningful and transcend just the high school experience. (It’s about) moving away from content retention and memorization and more towards actual skills applications.”

Computer science teacher Joshua Paley, who gave a TEDx talk in 2023 about the flaws of the current grading system, sees potential in the plan but also has some worries.

“I worry about class sizes being an issue because the teachers will have to get to know the students better, and it’s hard to do that with the class sizes as large as they are,” he said. “With that said, the concept is as promising as anything related to grades that I’ve seen in a long time … But, as long as the word ‘grades’ is involved, I’ll always be skeptical.”

Still, Catalano added that the adjustment will be a collaborative process.

“We don’t want anybody to jump into this without feeling ready to do it,” Catalano said. “(Administrators) want to make sure that we are supporting both teachers and students so that we have a transition that feel smooth and that everybody feels supported.”

The Ethnic Studies Committee includes Assistant Superintendent of Secondary Education Dr. Gulliermo Lopez, Gunn Social Studies Instructional Lead Jeff Patrick, Paly Social Studies Instructional Lead Mary Sano and other Gunn and Paly teachers. The group was founded during the 2022-23 school year in response to A.B. 101, which mandates that all California high schools make ethnic studies a graduation requirement for the Class of 2030 — current sixth graders — or earlier.

During the meeting, Lopez, Patrick and Sano presented on the course’s new curriculum. Ethnic studies at PAUSD will be segmented into five units, starting with unit zero, Why Ethnic Studies, and continuing with Identity; Power, Privilege and Systems of Opression; Resilience and Resistance; and Action and Civic Engagement, a capstone project. Units one through three will include case studies centered around different primary sources from four ethnic groups: African Americans, Chicanx and Latinx Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Next year, Gunn and Paly will each pilot one ethnic studies class of 20 ninth graders, who will be selected through lottery at each site. According to Sano, one of the main goals of these classes is to garner feedback from students and teachers.

In response to the presentation, Paly Student School Board Representative junior Karthi Gottipati said that students should play a bigger role in the course design process, and warned that if unable to give input, students might feel less interested in to the finished course.

“It is entirely pointless to have an ethnic studies course that is designed for adults and by adults if students don’t know and don’t care what’s being taught,” he said during the meeting.

Gunn Student School Board Representative senior Chris Lee (who is also managing editor for �鶹��ӳ���) also emphasized the importance of considering the intended recipients of the new course.

“The (students) who I talked to felt like the conversation surrounding ethnic studies — especially at these Board meetings — was getting further and further away from them and their priorities,” he said during the meeting. “It’s important for parents and other community members to understand that the course is ultimately for students.”

After the ethnic studies presentation, the AI ad hoc committees from Gunn, Paly and PAUSD — composed of mostly high school students, staff and technology experts at the district level — shared generative AI goals for the district. These goals included furthering equity and inclusion by using generative AI to summarize texts for English Language Learners and neurodiverse students, as well as developing alternate lesson plans that prevent — or render ineffective — the use of AI by covering topics that software such as ChatGPT hasn’t learned about.

Gunn committee member sophomore Sujay Dorai presented his hopes for AI’s future in the district.

“I think it’ll be a positive change because it’s really a really powerful technology,” he said. “I hope that the district can use this to get rid of busy work.”

Board member Shounak Dharap was appreciative of the AI committee’s work and saw it as an important focus point for the district.

“(The AI committee) is the most important thing the district is doing,” Dharap said during the meeting. “It touches every single other thing we’re doing. I’m really interested in what we’re doing and really supportive of everything.”

The Idaho regional competition comprised practice matches, qualifications and playoffs. During the qualifications, robots accrued ranking points for a chance to compete in the playoffs, which determined the event winners.
After the first round of qualifications,
GRT — registered under the team number
192 — was in 43rd place of 43 teams due to
repeated control failures. After all rounds
of qualifications, however, GRT was in 20th
place, and was selected to join Alliance 7 by

the alliance captain, team 2122.
In the final best-of-three rounds, GRT’s
alliance and the opposing alliance each won
one match, leading to a final tiebreaker that
ended with a score of 103 for Alliance 7 and
97 for Alliance 1.
Learning from past mistakes allowed the
team to be successful this year, according to
Safety Captain junior Amelia Perry.
“We have a system to pass information to
future years, which is why we have lasted so
long as a team,” she said.
As the regional winners, GRT and their
alliance captain team 2122 from Boise, Idaho,
will continue to the April 17 to 20 FIRST world
championship in Houston, Texas.

This year’s election marked a shift from approval voting, in which students can select multiple candidates, to ranked-choice voting, in which students can still select multiple choices, but ranked in order of preference. SEC also implemented a new vote-tallying system, changed the location and time of the assembly and altered the candidate speech format.

Six current SEC officers, all seniors, planned and coordinated the elections process: Associated Student Body President Nathan Levy, ASB Vice President Jazmin Rodrigo, School Board Representative Chris Lee (who is also a managing editor for �鶹��ӳ���), ASB Treasurer Leo Yao, Green Commissioner Angelina Rosh and Wellness Commissioner Daniel van Schewick.

According to Levy, the ranked-choice voting system is more representative because it selects the most universally liked candidate. When tabulating votes for contests with more than two candidates, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and their second-choice votes are redistributed to the remaining candidates based on the ballot rankings until one candidate reaches a majority. As such, the election winner may be most people’s second choice if no candidate has a majority of first-choice votes. Levy noted that this voting method encourages candidates to reach out to more people: They can still benefit from convincing students to place them in a higher position, even if it is not first.

Sophomore Asha Iyer-Schulz, however, pointed out some flaws of the new system.

“In some ways, it’s good that there’s more choice, but it’s a lot easier and takes less time to just choose one candidate,” she said. “I don’t think it mattered much on the results because there weren’t many candidates for each race and it felt like it was just popularity.”

Alongside the new voting system was a new vote-tallying system. In the past, SEC paid for TallySpace, an online vote-tallying service. This year, however, they began using Google Forms and a free online tally counter. According to Student Activities Director Lisa Hall, Schewick and Web/Tech Commissioner senior Dylan Lu also wrote code to eliminate those who voted multiple times or voted for a different class’s officers.

Unlike last year, in which the assembly was held during study hall/SELF in Titan Gym, this year’s election was held twice during a double second period in Spangenberg Theater. Seniors, who were not eligible to vote, had study hall.

During the assembly, rather than giving a speech, each candidate introduced themselves briefly before SEC officers asked them one to three questions specific to the position they were running for. Candidates running unopposed only gave speeches.

According to Levy, all answers were timed strictly so that the assembly would not run over time. Candidates rotated the order that they answered in order to ensure fairness.

Current Freshman Class Vice President and Sophomore Class Vice President-elect Sara Su appreciated this year’s friendly competition.

“It was a lot smaller and there were less materials last year,” she said. “It’s cool to see everyone go all out this year like making posters, giving out handouts or making silly campaign videos.”

According to Hall, around 50% of eligible students participate in schoolwide elections every year. She encourages students to exercise their right to vote, especially for classwide elections, which have lower voter participation rates.

“These people put themselves forward, and it’s important for the student body to get to know the candidates, find out what they really stand for and what they think that they can accomplish in the role — understanding that it’s a job,” she said. “Your vote does count, and sometimes these races do come down to just a few votes. Even though we don’t reveal those exact counts, I can assure you that they do matter.”

At the beginning of each school year, the Student Activities Center sells parking permits, which are required for students to park their cars in the parking lot. Only juniors and seniors with driver’s licenses are able to purchase one, and those living beyond El Camino Real, Foothill Expressway, Page Mill Road or Adobe Creek are eligible to purchase permits a week earlier than other students. Students must provide their name, parents’ names, grade, driver’s license number, license plate number and car model. This identifying information is then linked to each pass. According to Assistant Principal of Facilities Dr. Mycal Hixon, as of April 8, all of the passes are sold out, but there is a waiting list for interested students.

The Palo Alto Police Department is responsible for ticketing cars without permits in the parking lot, which they try to do on a daily basis. Administrators first discovered a fake pass when ticketing officers called a student to move their car from a handicapped parking spot and found that the person who answered the phone was not the person whose information was linked to the parking pass.

One senior, who requested anonymity to protect themselves from disciplinary action, was unable to purchase a parking pass and decided to create a counterfeit.

“I was willing to buy one, and I even went and talked with them multiple times to try to get one,” they said. “(The school said they needed) to count the number of available spaces. I was like, okay, and that took them like three months to figure out. In the meantime, I figured out how to trace one to make a copy.”

The anonymous senior made a few passes for other students, and is also aware of other students who are making replicas. At first, the senior made the fake passes with polyvinyl chloride sublimation, before starting to order directly from the company that manufactures Gunn’s permits.

Administrators believe that there are currently 20 or more fake permits in circulation. Each legitimate pass has a unique ID number. Most counterfeit passes are identifiable because they repeat ID numbers, but most times they go unnoticed because ticketing officers aren’t able to closely check each pass’s ID.

According to Hixon, administrators have started looking into harder-to-fake permits for next school year, such as ones that use more laser-perforated holes or ultraviolet images for identification. Those with counterfeit permits this year may receive a parking citation or a ban from purchasing a permit in the future.

“(The security) started checking a bit, and there’s some people who had poorly made replicas,” the anonymous senior said. “For the people who I’ve seen get their fakes taken, the campus supervisor came up to them while they were in their car and asked to see it up close. Then they would ask for your name, and if the name didn’t match the one that was on the list, they would take it and not give it back.”

Senior Indira Raja, who has been on the parking pass waitlist for nine months, resorted to parking without a permit because driving is her only way to get to school.

“I know that the construction takes up a lot of the parking lot spaces, and there have been fake parking passes some of the students have been getting, so it’s been super difficult for the admin to give enough spaces for the students,” she said. “But I also just don’t want to be scared to get a parking ticket while I’m sitting in my sixth-period class.”

World Terakoya Program, based in Tokyo, was founded by Stanford post-graduate student Masaki Nakamura in 2022. This year’s exchange was the second one they have organized.��

Japanese teacher Matt Hall invited all students in his Japanese classes to host exchange students at their homes, but prioritized his Japanese 3 and AP Japanese classes due to students’ higher proficiency with Japanese and the time commitment of hosting. In the end, 10 Gunn families who volunteered to be hosts were connected with exchange students’ families in Japan.

��“It’s a tough ask,” Hall said. “You’re asking for a week of the family’s time and all of this week at school. (They have to) bring a Japanese homestay with them to everywhere, every class. And if they’ve got a sports team meeting after school practice, they’ve got to bring them to that. So it’s a lot of work because everybody’s busy.”��

Many of the Japanese exchange students came to the U.S. to research one topic of their choice through creating various surveys and questionnaires. For example, junior Mitsuki Hamasaki, who attends Osaka Business Frontier High School, was most interested in entrepreneurship. Beyond gauging Gunn students’ interest in business and learning more about the U.S. economy, Hamaski also wanted to use this opportunity to improve his English.

“When they’re teaching English in Japan, they mainly teach reading and writing, but they don’t really teach speaking and listening that much,” Hamasaki said in a conversation translated from Japanese by his host, senior Yahya Mirza. “So (I) can do perfectly well on an English test, but when it comes to an actual conversation, it’s a lot more difficult.”

Hall shares this goal of mutual language integration for his students.��

“My goals were twofold: one certainly was for my students to help the Japanese guests,” Hall said. “It’s up to us to be good ambassadors of our culture, and anthropologists of their culture. The secondary goal is of course for my students to also get some practice with our Japanese. There really is a back-and-forth and give-and-take because my kids are learning a lot from them too.”

Host junior Nikki DeVincentis finds it rewarding to both help his exchange student learn more about Japanese culture, as well as practice Japanese in a more casual context.

“I’d say my favorite experience so far is probably just learning the colloquial language,” he said. “I can always learn more grammar patterns and learn more vocab, but (what I’ve learned from this experience) isn’t exactly something that can be taught, like all the slang and casual language. It’s just been really exciting to be able to converse with them in a natural tone, different from the Japanese that I’ve been taught in class.”

Exchange student sophomore Minori Ohishi, who is interested in studying animal welfare, expresses gratitude for her host’s — and Gunn’s —��welcoming attitude.��

“I can’t speak English well and I am only here for a week, but everyone accepted me warmly, talked and ate with me as a member of their family or their friend,” Ohishi said. “I (just) want to say thank you.”

Ohishi found the Palo Alto community’s inclusivity pleasantly surprising.

“I’m surprised the most at the warmth of people,” she said. “People from many different countries live here, and everyone accepts each other without denying everyone else. I think this is a wonderful thing.”

��Those involved in the exchange —��students and staff alike —��have appreciated the Gunn community’s flexibility and openness. According to Hall, teachers from every department have been cooperative with the extra students and Japanese staff members coming in to observe their classes.

“People talk a lot about teachers being very solo or very, ‘I just want to teach my classes and nobody bother me,’ but that’s certainly not been the case,” Hall said. “I’ve received tremendous support from the overall staff and their willingness to show what they’re all about. And these Japanese staff members, they’ve never seen Americans teach, (but) they’re seeing the best of the best here at Gunn.”

Exchange students are seeking survey responses from Gunn students. Below are surveys created by junior Mitsuki Hamasaki and sophomore Minori Ohishi.

Mitsuki Hamasaki: ��

Minori Ohishi:

The new exam will be taken on a student’s or a school-issued device, and will be partitioned into two — rather than the current three — sections: Reading and Writing, and Math. The test will also be 46 minutes shorter.

This change follows a 2021 pilot project conducted by the College Board, which showed that a digital SAT was less stressful for 80% of students in comparison to its pencil-and-paper counterpart. The current paper SAT will no longer be offered starting March 9.

The test will also be adaptive, meaning students’ performance on the first set of questions affects the difficulty of the following set. Difficult problems that are correctly answered will yield higher scores than easier questions, though the final score will still be out of 1600.

Given these changes, students who have spent time preparing for the print exam, such as sophomore Archer Jin, have had to alter their study habits.

“I’d rather do the old type because everything I’ve practiced is related to that,” Jin said.

Junior Sophia He echoed Jin’s sentiments.

“I’m not a fan of the digital SAT because I feel like I’ve already spent time preparing for the paper one, and having it suddenly switch to digital means I have to adapt to a new system,” she said.

Still, Assistant Principal of Testing Rebecca Shen-Lorenson noted that the SAT is just one of many exams going digital, and students taking the exam during their junior year will already have had practice with the digital PSAT — administered for the first time in October 2023.

“I’m hoping that moving from paper and pencil is actually going to be more effective and advantageous for students,” she said.

Because students are allowed to bring their own devices to the exam, however, some have expressed concerns about academic honesty. Shen-Lorenson doubts that cheating will be an issue, especially considering that students will receive different adaptiveq uestions. Additionally, according to the SAT Terms and Conditions on the College Board website, violation of any policies related to test security can result in a dismissal from the test center, a score cancellation or a test-taking ban, depending on the severity of the offense.

Although many students believe that their performance on the SAT will decide their future, Shen-Lorenson urges them to consider the larger picture.

“For the SAT, (students) should not put too much pressure on themselves because it is only one point of reference for universities,” she said. “Just take a deep breath. Remember that you’re trying your best and if this is your first time taking the SAT, look at it as your first experience (for) what to expect next time.”

In contrast to past spring spirit weeks, which have usually included schoolwide dress-up themes and lunch activities, SPROCO will be similar to �鶹��ӳ���coming Week, with daily grade-specific dress-up themes and games during brunch, lunch and PRIME.

Some brunch and lunch games — such as Balloon Stomp, in which participants attempt to pop as many of their opponents’ balloons as possible — are repeats from �鶹��ӳ���coming Week activities. Others, such as Obstacle Course and Pool Relay, will be reworked versions of
their �鶹��ӳ���coming Week counterparts. The week will also feature completely new events: In Pizza Noodles, competitors will hold a pizza box in their palm while trying to knock others’ boxes off with a foam pool noodle.

According to organizer senior Chris Lee, school board representative and managing editor for �鶹��ӳ���, SPROCO emerged from an SEC impact project, in which SEC members create a new event, initiative or system that benefits the student body. Senior Class Vice President Naya Nebriaga is also on the SPROCO team and has high hopes for student engagement.

“Because seniors tied (during �鶹��ӳ���coming Week) this year, I think that was more of a driving force to make (SPROCO) actually happen,” she said.

SEC created a reveal video for SPROCO, released during PRIME on Feb. 28. The video featured Lee and Nebriaga in a flashback to October’s �鶹��ӳ���coming Week and teased some grade-specific themes — including “�鶹��ӳ���coming Deja Vu,” in which the dress-up for each grade is pulled from October’s homecoming.

“At first, it was difficult coming up with an idea because we’re not revealing a theme — we’re revealing the week itself,” Lee said. “But I actually think that worked out better in the long run because we were able to start from a blank slate and have a more creative plot.”

Through this reveal video — past ones have helped publicize schoolwide events — Instagram posts and posters around campus, SEC hopes to increase and participation.

Beyond SEC, students are looking forward to participating in the new spirit week. Freshman Audrey Berger hasn’t experienced major spirit events other than �鶹��ӳ���coming Week and anticipates enjoying SPROCO.

“I’ve heard that (SPROCO) wasn’t really a strong tradition until this year, and I think it’s really cool that as a freshman, I get to experience that,” she said.