   These days, racial literacy has become one of the most important skills to learn in order to interact with the world around us. As described by PPS, racial literacy means understanding the experiences and perspectives of different cultures and races, being aware of our biases, and being willing and able to acknowledge and address racial issues. Completing a racial literacy course teaching these skills is a graduation requirement for the classes of 2025 and beyond, and many students end up taking Princeton Introduction to Racial Literacy (PIRL) due to its convenience. Racial Literacy, the in-person option for fulfilling the requirement, is a semester-long course limited to juniors and seniors. PIRL, on the other hand, is a digital, asynchronous class that is open to all students, regardless of grade. However, due to the online and solitary nature of PIRL, student learning is greatly impacted and prevents them from developing the compassion and awareness expected of being “racially literate.” 
   When taking PIRL, there are no opportunities for social interaction among students, which impairs their ability to effectively retain the information they’ve learned through the course. Thus, students find themselves missing out on discussions, group activities, projects, and other opportunities to test their knowledge and interact with the material. The course states that communication is limited in order to allow students to reflect on their “thoughts and behaviors about race and oppression;” however, in reality, the lack of collaborative projects and feedback on assignments often acts as an obstacle for comprehension. Students can feel as though they are alone in the course and therefore care less about it, which often worsens understanding of the material. 
   Furthermore, with the need to read and watch lengthy passages and videos that are often difficult to comprehend and carry out the course’s intended purpose in a vague manner, students can often find themselves struggling to stay focused on the content. For instance, in a required text called “Stones, Fruit, Sand & Beliefs,” students are asked to contemplate the question, “What do we learn about our beliefs (values) from studying stones, trees, fruit and sand?”, and to “identify a proverb that resonates with [them]” from a list of nature-related phrases. This activity has little relevance to the stated purpose of the course, and it is even more likely to cause students to struggle to learn and feel a lack of commitment to learning about racial literacy when paired with online learning’s many opportunities for distraction and the lack of accountability in asynchronous environments. As students are only required to complete one activity per module, they often end up doing the bare minimum. 
   Additionally, the course does not provide students the opportunity to share their experiences with others, or give them a platform to participate in conversations about current racial justice issues. Because they don’t get the chance to learn from other students who might provide thought-provoking insights, students who typically do not face racial injustices are less likely to understand the purpose and impact of the course. 
   Despite its asynchronous format, PIRL should encourage students to speak up about race-related issues. This could be done in several ways, like creating discussion assignments where all students can contribute their opinions, or having mandatory online meetings (on various dates, to preserve flexibility) for students taking the class in order to discuss material and learn from each other. By implementing these adjustments, PIRL can become a course that not only enhances students’ understanding and empathy, but also provides a space where students can learn to have meaningful discussions surrounding marginalization. 

PIRL had the right intentions, but the wrong methods

Over this coming summer and the next few years, PHS plans to undergo construction to address potential overcrowding and maintenance issues. The need for these changes stem from increasing enrollment numbers in the district, as well as the increasing age of the PHS building itself. 
For the summer construction plans, PHS will be using funding from a previously approved referendum in order to modify older parts of the building. These changes include replacing half of the roof of PHS, power washing the other half, getting new doors and locks for the doors, redoing the entire cafeteria to increase its efficiency during break, modifying the school’s vestibules, improving the building’s wiring and surveillance cameras, and installing proximity readers which require scanning students’ IDs to access different places around the school. 
These changes come in addition to the regular maintenance of cleaning the entirety of the building and painting a new section of the school, both of which occur every summer. However, some changes may take longer than the summer to implement. 
“There’s going to be an update with ... the type of ID that we give and the [proximity readers], so there’s going to be prox readers on the bathroom [and] rehearsal doors ... [but] prox readers are going to happen more around the time between teacher’s convention and next year” Assistant Principal Rashone Johnson said. 
Plans have been placed on hold until the New Jersey Department of Education approves the referendum, but they push for bigger changes within PHS. The referendum would most significantly change the layout of the Numina Gallery and technology office to increase school capacity due to school population growth. Overall, the spaces would be split up such that three new classrooms, one small group room, and two other flexible spaces that could be used for the gallery or instructional work could be made. The corridors surrounding these rooms would become the Numina Gallery, and the technology office would relocate to PMS. In addition to these renovations, the school’s outdated HVAC system would be replaced as well.
“These [construction layouts] are some of the potential plans and nothing’s finalized. We’re still working with the school administrators,” said Matthew Bouldin, Business Administrator and Board Secretary of PPS. 
Tentatively, construction using the referendum will start in November 2025 when the designs are finalized, and construction will be done around December 2027. While there will be major infrastructure changes over the next couple of years, there are also future plans for the building in order to address other potential problems like overcrowding. 
“We put out a report in 2021 as part of [the referendum’s] process which shows a potential addition to the high school if you are facing to the right of where the trailers are right now to the [Learning] Commons ... it could be something in the future,” Bouldin said. 
Bouldin emphasizes that the main focus of these projects is making sure that PHS’s facilities can accommodate students while maintaining optimal class sizes. 
“We can always increase class sizes except for at the very low levels like kindergarten [which] is capped, but pretty much every other grade level, the Department of Education doesn’t have hard caps ... It’s  a combination of improving our facilities but also expanding them to be able to house the students,” Bouldin said.

Coming this summer: PHS Construction

   In recent years, PHS has been reducing accessibility to harder courses through introducing stricter prerequisites. There has been much debate as to whether or not this shift widens academic gaps by restricting those without the means to keep up. What this discussion often misses is that these restrictions give students a transitional period between primary, secondary, and higher education. This slower approach allows them to fully develop the skills to thrive in more difficult courses. Making advanced classes harder to take is actually one of the better changes to our education system in recent years. 
   This debate largely began in 2015 with the passing of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA),  a plan to ensure that public schools across the United States provide all students with a quality education. Under ESSA, states are encouraged to develop more rigorous academic standards, such as more restrictive prerequisites for advanced classes. Another goal of ESSA is to reduce academic disparities for underprivileged students. ESSA ensures that even students at schools with less resources are being taught with rigorous standards for the content of the material that is covered. ESSA provides states with lower performance rates additional targeted funding and technical assistance. This means that under ESSA, academic disparities based on demographic factors are addressed. 
   There were additional reasons for enacting these policies; taking advanced classes as underclassmen in high school often means a significant mental burden for students. Being introduced to the pace and depth of college-level coursework in the first years of high school would overwhelm any student. This burden can not only affect students’ academic performance but also damage their overall well-being, potentially leading to heightened stress, anxiety, and even burnout. In a 2018 study conducted on a group of over two thousand students in Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes, researchers Suldo et al. found that even with ESSA, 71 percent of the students experienced burnout, an alarmingly high proportion. Allowing students to continue to race ahead would only worsen this. Instead, if students are encouraged to classes later on in high school, students are given time to develop skills like time management and study techniques that can be used in higher level academics. This way, when students sign up for advanced classes, they are better equipped both mentally and academically, reducing the risk of burnout and other mental health issues. 
   Low grades are also a stressor for students that jump into advanced classes without being fully prepared. “Easier” classes provide a glimpse into the subject, leaving students with the opportunity to explore various interests without compromising their GPA. 
   The shift toward lower accessibility of advanced courses is a positive step towards creating a more equitable educational environment for all students. By developing a more demanding outline of criteria for enrollment, administrators ensure that students are well-equipped with the skills needed to thrive in such demanding classes, which in turn decreases the chance that they will struggle later on. In advocating for policies like the ESSA, schools grant students the opportunity to reach their full potential in high school and beyond.

Embracing the challenge of PHS’ s advanced classes

   All teachers and staff members are tasked with the responsibility of fostering a positive learning environment for their students. Whether that be allowing students to go for walks when they feel anxious in class, asking students what they did over the weekend, or opening up office hours for students to ask questions, a major part of teaching is creating a space for students to feel comfortable in. However, this comfortable environment can begin to crack as students and teachers delve into more sensitive subjects. Body image is not always an explicit topic in our classes but it tends to come up far more frequently than we may realize. A simple comment on a character in a book’s described appearance, the analysis of the human form in an art piece, or even a seemingly harmless joke about the body stirs up the discussion of body image in the minds of students. Discussion of body image can be incredibly triggering to some students leading to body dysmorphia, unhealthy eating habits, and mental health issues. Considering how quickly a discussion of looks can turn into one of body image, it seems that avoiding the subject of bodies all together could be beneficial at PHS. 
   Gym and health classes contain a large majority of the insensitive discussions surrounding body image that happen in school. It is understandable that a class that is intended to encourage health and fitness would bring up the body as a topic, but these discussions are often not handled particularly well. Each year as the holidays come around, our gym and health teachers remind us not to eat too many carbs over the holidays and to make sure we walk off the extra calories. While these reminders to students before the holidays can be helpful, they can also be incredibly triggering. They also fail to take into account the fact that dieting and weight loss may not be healthy options for some students. These comments also perpetuate a harmful norm that weight loss is the ideal solution to body image issues. By idealizing this solution, teachers continue to push that assumption on to students creating even more harmful standards through which students assume they should view themselves.  
   Insensitivity to body image discussions are oftentimes unintentional, speech rooted from previous stereotypes regarding specific body types. For instance, art teachers’ comments on the ideal body figure in sketches, discussing what they think is a “good” or healthy figure or, teachers undermining student’s knowledge on certain “healthy” products because they don’t look fit; these are all instances that one may come across. The idea that weight was an indicator of status comes up in every single history class at least once. However, pointing such a fact out in reference to a historical figure in front of students living in an environment without those body standards can harbor internalization and self comparison. Even the media that teachers chose to show to students can be harmful by implicitly pushing body image standards and harmful norms. It is important to make use of a diverse array of representations to ensure that students do not feel singled out or pressured by the implicit displays of body image in the classroom. 
   Although a comfortable learning environment does stem from our teachers, maintaining respect between students, especially surrounding body image, is the key way to ensure that students feel good in their own skin. Walking through the main intersection at PHS makes every student privy to hundreds of harsh comments, jokes, and implicit ideas that can be incredibly harmful to mental health even by stirring up harmful ideas in students’ heads. It is important that students take even a second to think about the consequences of what they say and how things could be interpreted. In a perfect world, we would eliminate all comments about others’ appearance including compliments on clothing or hairstyle as those comments bring attention back to the body rather than highlighting the merit of those around us. However, this kind of respect between students stems from our teachers leading by example by eliminating harmful comments and opening up the more difficult conversations surrounding body image in a sensitive way. 
   Going forward, our teachers should put a greater emphasis on sensitivity surrounding body image. Before a sensitive lesson, teachers should give students a trigger warning and allow students to leave the room if they are struggling with a certain subject so long as they check in with her before the end of the period. That reflects a level of trust and mutual respect between the teacher and their students. Additionally,  Teachers should also work to include greater representations of all body types so as to not push harmful body image standards on to students. We must speak cognizantly about body image — no one knows what another person can be going through and what even back-handed compliments can trigger.

The Tower

Aarna Dharmavarapu's Work

The Tower