Freshman opens bike repair business, Dom fixes bikes
Why you should support the actors strike
Page 5 Conestoga High School, Berwyn PA, 19312
Volume 74 No. 1
October 2, 2023
shoot-a-thon: Senior basketball player starts new fundraiser
PagE 8
Page 10
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the parking predicament
Escaped murderer caught
4-day-a-week parking returns for 2023-24 school year
Jui Bhatia
Co-Opinion Editor
Courtesy Mason Garcia
Open spots: Due to a lack of available spaces in Conestoga’s main lot, students are only allowed to park on campus for four days a week this year. At around 1:30 p.m on Monday, Sept. 18, the student portion held more than 100 open spots.
By Ben Shapiro, Editor-in-Chief Seniors may only park on campus four days a week this school year, the first time in five years and the second time in Conestoga High School’s history that school administration placed such a restriction. Traditionally, seniors have enjoyed the privilege of on-campus parking five days a week. However, due to the size of the Class of 2024 — the Tredyffrin/Easttown School District’s largest class since 1980 at almost 700 students — there is not
enough space in Conestoga’s parking lots to accommodate five-daya-week parking for all seniors. According to 12th grade assistant principal Dr. Patrick Boyle, who oversees Conestoga’s facilities, the size of the Class of 2024 is roughly 150 students larger than Conestoga’s average class. Because of this, if he allowed seniors to park all five days of the week, he would have had to deny parking permits to around 60 students — a scenario he wanted to avoid. “I don’t want to deny kids parking. Now, it’s a privilege, not a right, but they look forward to it,” Boyle
said. “I just thought that denying a large number of kids parking would be a lot worse than denying (all of them) one day of parking.” The first and only previous time that Conestoga implemented a four-day-a-week parking restriction was during the 201819 school year. At the time, there were only 265 parking spots designated for student use, which could not accommodate the size of the senior class. In 2021, the school added a new south parking lot for teachers, which opened up 85 spots in the larger, main lot for students.
While the additional parking spots allowed more students to park on campus, they do not provide enough space for the current seniors. According to Boyle, 410 seniors requested a permit to park in one of the 350 parking spots available for student use. “Before COVID, we had maybe 60-70% of students parking every day,” Boyle said. “Now, (more) students have access to cars because some of their parents are working from home. The number of students who park every day has risen.” Now, Boyle estimates that around 80% of seniors park every
day. He said that he used to oversell permits, but is unable to do so now because of the growing number of daily parkers. Despite the new limitations, the cost of a parking permit has remained at $180, the same price that the school board set in 2010 when seniors could park five days a week. For the past couple of years, TESD has made an annual income of roughly $63,000 from student parking permits. This year, that figure is expected to be around $83,000 due to the increased number of permits issued.
The school board distributes all of the money collected from parking permits into the General Fund, the district’s primary account used to finance its day-to-day activities. Deborah Ealer, a mother of two Conestoga graduates and one current Conestoga senior, feels that the $180 fee is “not moral” given that students cannot use the permit one day a week. “Our costs are through the roof for parking,” Ealer said. “Why are we not reducing the fee when we’re reducing the services provided?” Continued on page 3.
On Aug. 31, convicted murderer Danelo Cavalcante escaped from Chester County Prison by scaling a wall in the exercise yard and crawling through a barbed wire fence. After evading authorities across eastern Pennsylvania for nearly two weeks, officials caught Cavalcante in the Pottstown area on Sept. 13. In April 2021, Cavalcante was convited of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his girlfriend Deborah Brandao. Prosecutors in Brazil are also looking to charge him in another homicide case. He was awaiting transfer to a state prison when he escaped. Officials spotted Cavalcante around 25 miles south of Berwyn at Longwood Gardens on Sept. 4, prompting the gardens to close as police activity in the area increased. Two days later, officials closed schools in the Kennett Consolidated and the Unionville-Chadds Ford School Districts as a precautionary measure due to reported sightings in the area. Officials finally narrowed down Cavalcante’s location in the early hours of Sept. 13, when search helicopters, scanning the Pottstown area for heat signatures, detected Cavalcante’s presence. Police surrounded the area, but their efforts were delayed by a storm. At around 8 a.m., officials managed to capture Cavalcante with the help of a police dog. Following his capture, officials escorted Cavalcante to the State Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in Montgomery County, where he will serve out his life sentence. After a court appearance on Wednesday, Sept. 13, the courts charged Cavalcante with felony escape and denied his bail.
Conestoga offers new dual enrollment programs Faith Zantua Co-Copy Editor
Aren Framil/The SPOKE
Online examination: Junior Aashita Singh looks at the PSAT page on the College Board website. The College Board recently developed a digital adaptive PSAT. It plans to nationally implement the digital version starting in October.
PSAT goes digital Aren Framil
Co-News Editor On Oct. 11, hundreds of Conestoga freshmen, sophomores and juniors will take the Preliminary SAT (PSAT), a standardized test administered annually by the College Board. However, this year’s test-takers will face an entirely new, digitally adaptive format which will make the exam shorter, more secure and less stressful for examinees, according to the College Board. The changes in format go beyond simply transferring the test to a digital medium. Before test day, students will download the program Bluebook on their computers, which prevents the use of other browsers while taking an exam. The digital test will take around two hours and 15 minutes, as opposed to the three hours required for the paper version. Additionally, the College Board combined the reading and writing sections and eliminated the no-calculator math portion.
The test will be in a “stage adaptive” format, which will be in the form of modules. Matty Steiner, Senior Director of Outreach at Compass Education Group, presented the standardized testing changes to parents during the Sophomore Springboard program as part of the group’s partnership with Conestoga. Steiner believes that the implementation of an adaptive format is meant to make test-taking an easier, more manageable experience for students. “The (digital) PSAT and SAT are ‘stage adaptive’ exams,” Steiner said. “That essentially means that everyone takes a section of critical reading and writing questions and one section of math questions, and based on your pattern of correct and incorrect answer choices, (the test) sends you to an easier or harder module.” The exam program will pull from a database of thousands of potential questions, giving each test-taker a unique set of test items. No two tests will be the same, which the College Board hopes will reduce the risk of
cheating. However, this method of selecting questions means that the College Board will not release any answers or analysis of the test material, something it has provided for the previous paper tests. In October 2022, thenConestoga freshmen took a digital PSAT, while then-sophomores and juniors took the regular paper test. Unlike the digital adaptive test, the online PSAT simply contained the questions on the paper PSAT transposed to a digital medium. Sonal Shah, a current sophomore who took the digital PSAT last fall, believes the digital method of test-taking offers some advantages over the conventional format. “With paper tests, you spend time going back and forth (between pages),” Shah said. “But, for (the digital test), you don’t have to keep on going back and forth. When you get to a question you can scroll up and down, and it’s much easier to find the information.”
In October 2022, a team of district faculty, including 11th grade assistant principal Dr. Matthew Sterenczak, started looking into different dual enrollment options for Conestoga. This year, Conestoga officially partnered with Gwynedd Mercy, Immaculata and West Chester universities to provide new dual enrollment programs. Students who successfully pass a university’s dual enrollment course will receive one Conestoga credit and three credits the university is providing that course. District faculty began looking into dual enrollment options due to interest in expanding learning options, the implementation of a Pennsylvania law requiring school entities to have at least one dual enrollment agreement and local universities’ expansion of dual enrollment programs resulting from the law.
West Chester University requires high school students to go to its Graduate Center to take a dual enrollment course. Conestoga is currently finalizing the details of the arrangement. Conestoga teachers will teach Gwynedd Mercy and Immaculata’s courses at the high school. Gwynedd Mercy offers accounting and economics courses, and Immaculata offers an astronomy course. “We want to make sure that there (is) access (to dual enrollment),” Sterenczak said. “So if a student can’t drive or doesn’t have enough free periods in their schedule to get to another location, we (can) still find a way for them to participate in dual enrollment.” Before enrolling, students must pay a fee to the university. Gwynedd Mercy’s fee is $400 per course and Immaculata’s is $300. Students in a Conestoga class with a dual enrollment counterpart will learn the same material in the same class as students paying for dual enrollment, re-
gardless of if they’re paying for dual enrollment credit. Conestoga administration looked into universities that have syllabi and curriculum requirements matching Conestoga’s in order to prevent any major changes to classes’ current syllabi. A Conestoga teacher must have at least a master’s degree to teach a dual enrollment course, in most cases. Currently, Justin Davey, Bernadette D’Emilio, Brian Gallagher and Michael Kane will teach dual enrollment courses at Conestoga. D’Emilio, who teaches Accounting 1 and 2, has some concerns regarding the transfer of credits earned through dual enrollment to non-participating universities. “I think it (is) a good opportunity for the kids to possibly get (college) credit,” D’Emilio said. “I think the question remains ‘Will these credits transfer (to other universities)?’” Enrollment for Gwynedd Mercy and Immaculata’s pro-
grams is due on varying days from September to October this year depending on the specific course. The district plans to make West Chester’s course available next year. Students can sign up by talking to a guidance counselor. The universities only allow juniors and seniors to participate in dual enrollment. According to Sterenczak, district faculty will look into proposing the idea of younger grades taking dual enrollment courses. Sophomore Angela Wang, who currently takes Accounting 1, is interested in Gwynedd Mercy’s accounting course. “For $400, three college credits is pretty cheap,” Wang said. “But the biggest problem (for) me is that I don’t know if any university I’m going to go to in the future will accept the credit. I’m probably gonna do a lot of research, like go through my college list and see if any of them will accept the transfer of credit from that particular university.”
Faith Zantua/The SPOKE
New experiences: Students can take dual enrollment classes at West Chester University. A team of district faculty started looking into Gwynedd Mercy, Immaculata and West Chester universities’ dual enrollment programs last fall.