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.

My decision to watch the April 8 solar eclipse at the center of the path of totality stems from a family tradition: After traveling to Missouri to see the 2017 solar eclipse, my family followed this year’s eclipse to the beautiful beaches of Mazatlan, Mexico, where we saw all four minutes and 26 seconds of totality as the moon’s shadow came in over the western coast.

If you are in the path of totality like I was, after second contact — when the leading edge of the moon hits the leading edge of the sun — the moon directly overlaps with the sun and you can take off your protective eyewear to stare directly at the sun. It truly is a moment that a camera cannot do justice — the split-second transition from watching the tiny, orange sliver of sun wane away to observing the breathtaking faux sunset over the ocean, the sun a brilliant halo encompassing the pure black circle of the moon.

While I don’t believe in astrology, I can see how some would want feel a spiritual connection to totality. Astrology, in its original form, is an attempt to find personal meaning in the cosmos — a way to use the stars to explain what seems inexplicable. And even though we now have scientific explanations for why it looks like “the sun has been eaten” (according to some of the earliest carvings of eclipses), it can be fun — and for some, meaningful — to attach personal significance to the event.

Across the U.S., astrology believers have connected this event to horoscopes and omens. Following the April 5 New York and New Jersey earthquake, netizens took to Twitter claiming that the earthquake was a bad omen. According to CBS, a Philadelphia astrologist said that the eclipse would be extra meaningful to people with certain zodiac signs and signify different life moments for them.

At the same time, our fascination with eclipses has also led to advances in astronomy, as they are key moments to study the moon, the sun, light and orbits. A 1919 eclipse confirmed Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity three years after its publication. During this year’s eclipse, NASA sent out more scientific instruments by rocket to collect data on the eclipse’s effect on Earth.

Whether people look up at the skies to study the sun, find an astrological connection or take in the beauty of an infrequent natural occurrence, they gain appreciation for and curiosity about our world. While rare, eclipses are worthwhile and a reminder to reach for the sky. See you in Spain for the next one in 2026!

Taekwondo has grown into an integral part of An’s identity. In Korea, An viewed taekwondo more as a hobby, but he began spending over 15 hours a week on the sport after joining his new studio in the U.S., Taekwon Tigers. The studio encouraged him to become involved in competitions.

“Now, I want to do better,” he said. “I want to make sure I get higher rankings, but also just see myself improve as an athlete.”

Instead of sparring, An competes in “poomsae,” a performance of a pattern of taekwondo moves for a score. This focus on form instead of combat gave him a new perspective on the martial art.

“I’m grateful that it’s considered a sport, but it’s also an art with a lot of history,” he said. “Considering that it’s a Korean martial art, it’s a part of my cultural identity and it’s how I communicate with that (part of me).”

According to An, due to the rigid ranking system for the event in the U.S., it is very difficult to surpass competitors with a higher initial ranking. However, he has still managed to climb the ranks.

“(When) I made it to (the national taekwondo junior division) top 10, it felt like I kind of disproved that rigged system and showed that anyone could still make it up there as long as they really invested their time and effort,” An said.

Through taekwondo, An has learned to persevere, focus on making realistic progress and cultivate intrinsic motivation.

“At first, even though I was really bad at it, I just enjoyed it so much that I would do more,” he said. “I would go (to my studio) one to two hours earlier and stay after for another 30 minutes just to do the same thing over and over. It felt like I was doing something that not everyone else would be able to do later in their lives.”

Gallery • 22 Photos

Chinyoung Shao

Work hard, play harder: The juggling community embodied this saying during their fifth annual Game of Throws Festival last weekend. From Jan. 19-21, jugglers from all over the world learned, competed and above all else, had fun. 

Run by Gunn’s Juggling Club, the Game of Throws involved workshops and open-gym juggling sessions all weekend, a battle event Friday night, a gala show Saturday night and final games on Sunday. Events were free for jugglers and non-jugglers alike, except a $10 admission to the gala show, which had around 650 audience members. 

Friday night, attendees were welcomed to compete in a juggling battle — juggling and impromptu performing fused with the flair of a rap or breakdance battle. According to Juggling Club President junior Nikki DeVincentis, competitors performed 30-second on-the-spot acts.

“It’s so amazing, not only because you get to see some of the people who will perform at the gala show, but you also just get to see local talents join in,” they said. “People who nobody knows, or that nobody here knows, just come in and blow everybody away. It’s just so amazing to see the community come together.”

Juggling Club Advisor Matt Hall opened Saturday night’s gala show with his diabolo act. Over the course of the evening, ten performers displayed their skill with balls, clubs, diabolos, rings, hula hoops, unicycles and countless other juggling props, in a combination of both long-perfected and brand-new acts.

For the first time in his years hosting the festival, Hall joined the audience for the rest of the gala show with his wife, Gunn Student Activities Director Lisa Hall. 

“I hear people going, ‘Oh my god,’ ‘Whoa, how do you do that?’ ‘Whoa, that’s crazy,’ ‘That’s awesome,’ and I’m just loving it because this is what I want,” he said. “I want to introduce juggling and circus arts to the Palo Alto community and to Gunn High School.” 

At one point during the show, mulleted and mustachioed performer Mark Wilder pedaled onstage atop his unicycle in a bright blue suit with “PARTY” stitched on the back. Mesmerizing audience members,  he first jump-roped, then juggled clubs with a ball bouncing on a platform on a pole on his head, all while riding his unicycle to the tune of 80s hits. As his grand finale, he lowered himself to the ground and raised himself back up while balancing a ball atop a pole on his forehead. Wilder attended the Game of Throws last year as well, but this was his first year in the gala show. 

“The Game of Throws is the best juggling festival in the world right now,” Wilder said. “It attracts quality jugglers, world-class talent — not just the hobbyists but the performers from all over the country. People fly in from Chicago, Boulder, Texas. We had people from the Czech Republic, from Mexico, from New Zealand.”

According to Wilder, juggling transcends national boundaries. 

“Juggling is a language all jugglers speak, so you can go anywhere in the world and juggle with someone else,” he said. “Without knowing their language, you can still juggle together and have fun.”

The Game of Throws concluded on Sunday with more workshops, Olympic-style games and time for the jugglers to share their last tricks of the weekend. For Rhys Thomas, a gala-show performer, festivals like the Game of Throws are a defining aspect of the juggling community, offering opportunities for engagement and fun.

“What I find most uniquely wonderful about the juggling world is nowhere else will you find a room full of adults, like full of adults, just playing,” he said. “They’re not competing: There’s some competition, but for the most part, it’s a whole lot of people just playing.”

The Gunn Juggling Club, responsible for hosting the event, continues to meet on Wednesdays at lunch to draw more students into the enthralling activity they have come to love. 

“It is just like a sport, in my opinion, where you practice so much to get to move your body and (find) the most perfect way to accomplish this task,” DeVincentis said. “And I think that the end result of being able to perform something is really real. It’s just so dynamic watching all these things move through the air, getting a technique perfect.”

Watching the club meet on Jan. 24, the Wednesday after the festival, was one of the most rewarding outcomes of the festival  for Hall.

“Ultimately, it’s their festival,” he said. “They worked on the systems with me. They worked the (registration) desk. They taught workshops. It gets them stoked. They’re gonna walk away going ‘I’m never going to forget those three days at Gunn High School.’”

To judge a historical figure based solely on their era’s standards is to ignore centuries’ worth of social development. Although it is impossible to expect historical figures to have lived according to our societal norms, excusing horrific actions such as Columbus’ because they were “appropriate for their time” is disingenuous to ourselves today. It is necessary to evaluate historical figures based on our current standards to develop a more accurate understanding of traditional “heroes” while creating room for new narratives in the historical pantheon.

In 2017, the PAUSD Board of Education unanimously voted to rename Jordan and Terman Middle Schools because their original namesakes, David Starr Jordan and Lewis Madison Terman, were leaders of the eugenics movement, a pseudoscientific cause rooted in white supremacy and ableism. Their movement may have been popular — though still disputed — in its time, but that doesn’t justify their discriminatory beliefs. Honoring these men as figureheads of our middle schools brings their values into the present. Judging them by current moral guidelines is necessary because even though they are figures of the past, celebrating them occurs in the present. Thus, our expectations for them must be based on contemporary values.

The word “judging” often implies stark criticisms and blanket statements. Judgment, however, doesn’t need to be black and white. Thomas Jefferson, for example, supported individual freedoms while enslaving people. If we only evaluate a historical figure like Jefferson by the societal norms of his time, we assess him by the norms set by those in power in the 1800s — people who, at the time, condoned slavery. By reevaluating him using our current standards, we can create a fuller judgment relevant to our time that includes both deserved praise and necessary critique.

While removing a historical figure’s statue or name can cause backlash, it creates space for recognizing historical figures who better reflect our values. Applying current judgment to historical figures isn’t erasing history but expanding it to include people who would not have received the same recognition in their own time. Figures such as Sacagawea, who was never credited in her own time but is now the face of the gold dollar coin, can serve as inspirations to students who feel underrepresented in history classes.

Judging historical figures by modern standards is also essential in teaching. As products of our current time, we have inherent biases that are impossible to separate from our history education. Understanding these biases can help us contextualize our learning instead of trying to escape it. If we are to learn from history, we must teach it for the present.

By focusing on historical context and standards, we dismiss our responsibility to the betterment of our standards — and the countless people who have always condemned wrongdoing, even in the past. In assessing these figures through a contemporary lens, we can reevaluate how and which historical figures we celebrate and why. We can hold ourselves accountable and strive to build ourselves into better moral models for our current society and generations to come.

Ethnic studies at Gunn will be a sociology course examining the societal landscape of different ethnicities’ experiences and the historical context behind current events.

The current plan for the course, officially adopted during the Oct. 9 staff-development day, replaces the first semester of ninth-grade world history with the ethnic studies course. The content of the removed semester will be distributed across two semesters of ninth- and tenth-grade world history. District staff are preparing the curriculum to be presented to the school board this December.

The timeline — which was also recommended by the Ethnic Studies Committee, comprising social studies teachers at Gunn and Paly — allows the district to implement the course as soon as possible while still granting time to collect student and community input, according to Board Vice President Jesse Ladomirak. “The only thing worse than not talking about stuff is talking about stuff in a way that does more damage than being silent,” she said. “I would like to take the time and make sure we do it safely.”

With a date set, a student focus group led by Social Studies Instructional Lead Jeff Patrick met during PRIME on Oct. 18 to discuss what the skills, takeaways and content of the ethnic studies course should look like. The meeting served as a precursor to larger community meetings that will happen during the rest of the school year.

In preparation for the changes, world history teacher Christopher Johnson plans to start condensing his curriculum and incorporating more skill-based learning next school year. “Part of the push is to focus more on various skills such as sourcing, recognizing bias and opinion, and observational skills, but maybe one of the losses (is that) the content won’t be quite as rich as (before),” Johnson said.

The course’s placement aligns with that of many other districts in the state and is backed by a 2021 peer-reviewed Stanford University

Patrick, who taught the ethnic studies elective last year, said the new, required class will be altered to better suit freshman needs. It will center around four new Essential Learning Outcomes — historical thinking, writing, conversing and citizenship — in five units: identity, race and ethnicity, history and migration, language culture and learning, and action and civic engagement.

Gunn alumna Madison Yue, who took the elective last year and is a former features editor for �鶹��ӳ���, emphasized the importance of engaging with diverse narratives early on. “I wish I had the option to take ethnic studies as a freshman,” she said. “I think it is important for freshmen to take this class because (they) can learn about these different narratives and perspectives at an earlier point in high school (to) help unify our community.”

The course, however, does not come without controversy: Community members have noted that a single semester might not be not enough time for both content breadth and nuance, while others have concerns that the new class could provide an excuse to exclude material on underrepresented groups from other social studies classes.

These concerns were brought up during the Oct. 18 focus group. Some countered these arguments by saying that ethnic studies would equip students with the mindset and skills necessary to further explore diverse narratives in their future social studies classes. Patrick also noted that the course will focus on local demographics, with opportunities for students to learn about specific ethnic topics that interest them, such as through the final unit’s action project.

At the Sept. 12 school-board meeting, PAUSD Superintendent Don Austin addressed other concerns. Instead of adopting the state’s model curriculum, he said that PAUSD is creating its own curriculum, which will be built around topics brought up by the Ethnic Studies Committee and in future community focus groups. “The controversy is around some elements of the model curriculum,” he said. “We’re not adopting that, so we need to be super clear about that.”

The current plan is for district staff to present a curriculum to the school board this December. “If we go with this timeline, we might have some revision time, both from students who are in that class and as we continue to look at it,” Austin said.

According to Patrick, the ethnic studies elective will remain on the course catalog so that Gunn students graduating before 2029 can still take it.

Yue also highlighted other opportunities to get involved for students who are interested in the ethnic studies material. “I would take advantage of the resources at Gunn — for example, getting involved in affinity groups or the student equity committee,” she said. “Even if you’re not of a specific culture, check out those different cultural clubs and participate in the cultural events that SEC hosts.”