Author: adviser

Several Poly students attended the Fire Knife Polynesian Festival in Long Beach on Sept. 6 and 7.

Audience members of all ages and races came to celebrate the diverse culture of Polynesia.

“There weren’t just Polynesians; it was a very diverse crowd,” said Matilda Deadline.

Musicians and dancers performed into the night on a stage decked in hanging string lights and palm trees, while event staff passed out Hawaiian leis to the crowd.

Many forms of Polynesian dance from Tahiti, Fiji, and Tonga graced the stage, but the main performers of the event were the Samoan Fire Knife competitors.

Fire Knife is one of Samoa’s traditional ceremonial dances. The dancers perform with a machete on a wooden handle that is lit on fire at both ends, a tradition that requires skill and focus.

While the competition got heated (literally), so did the food vendors. They sold a variety of cultural cuisine, from chocolate chip cookies and egg rolls to pineapple burgers and spam musubi.

Traditional Samoan food was also sold in plates of chop suey, chicken, rice, and taro.

The annual Fire Knife Polynesian Festival was a big hit with Poly’s students and its community. Poly’s Pacific Islander club will be selling plates of Samoan food at their booth.

For the past thirteen years, Ms. Schwichtenberg’s classes have been saving the Earth one bottle at a time.

The students who developed this program sort, bag, and recycle almost 3,300 pounds of recyclables from Poly’s campus every year. After collecting the recycling, students in the program receive money from a larger recycling receptacle. This money goes towards supplies and activities for Poly’s special needs classes.

Not only does the project help Mother Earth, but it also helps special needs students to attain hands-on experience outside of the classroom.

“We like to encourage students with special needs to be a part of the program to give them specially designed job training and vocational education skills,” said. Ms. Schwichtenberg. “This helps prepare them for finding a job, learning to work in groups, time management, signing in and out, [and] banking and budgeting.”

These students’ efforts have led to the development of well- prepared young adults and a greener campus for Poly.

The program has even received acknowledgments from the City of Long Beach, and participated in the “Keep America Beautiful High School Recycling Contest.”

Poly’s recycling program is a well-oiled machine. Those who choose to participate in the recycling program at Poly have a routine for carrying out the recycling process.

Students can be seen every day during fifth period in their teams, collecting the bottles and cans from the blue bins of the classrooms that opt to have their recycling picked up.

But, what many people don’t see is the effort they put in to process the recycling.

Once a week, this recycling is received by one of Poly’s staff members and then sold to a larger receptacle. The money is given to the students every two weeks.

This process is beneficial because the students learn to record their work in time sheets and their paychecks in budget folders.

Students at Poly may not think about where their bottle goes once they toss it into a blue bin. But Jackrabbits can take pride that they not only help the environment when they recycle, but they help to provide job training to special needs students at Poly.

Poly’s annual Club Faire was held during lunch in the quad on Wednesday, Sept. 17.

Over 60 out of 120 chartered clubs participated. Despite it heating up to over ninety degrees, clubs both old and new campaigned fiercely for the recruitment of new members. Many clubs saw a large influx of recruits for the new school year.

“It’s starting to look like our best team yet,” said Asa Mazor-Freedman, President of Model UN. “We have so many new, capable members.”

“We’re looking forward to new members and fresh ideas,” said Co-President of Muffintops, Senior Han Vi. “We have a whole lot of new plans and recipes for the coming year.”

Freshmen were strongly encouraged to sign up for club activities.

“I joined the Ball for Life club because I’ve been playing basketball for 10 or 11 years; they also deal with donating shoes,” said freshman Miles Denmion.

“In middle school, there was nothing like Club Faire. We only had one elective, but here we can be a part of the community,” said fellow freshman Becca Guiterez.

There were clubs from almost all areas of interest, from League of Legends Club to the American Red Cross. All in all, the Club Faire was a huge success for the Poly community.

Many clubs will be planning for Homecoming Faire, which will be held on October 1st this year.

It’s not too late to sign up for clubs. Contact the club president or sponsor.

“It’s nice to see the students so involved and motivated,” said My Ngoc Nguyen, the new Activities Director. “This is a great kick off for the coming school year.”

As students return for the 2014-2015 school year, LBUSD will launch a new system for taking attendance. Most students at Poly are familiar with the traditional system for taking attendance. Since elementary school days, teachers have called out names, waited for responses, and then, using a pencil, appropriately filled in the corresponding bubble on their role sheet.

However, this year, teachers will record attendance with the use of a computer instead of a piece of paper. The digital forms will be sent directly to the attendance office.

Prior to implementation of this new system, students or teacher’s aides would frequently be asked to physically deliver the attendance sheets to the office. Th staff in the attendance office would then manually enter the information into a computer system. Eliminating the need for staff members to retrieve attendance sheets from each classroom means this digital, streamlined process for attendance will save time for both staff members and students.

The new attendance system is one of several examples of how Poly has begun to use technology to improve daily activities around the school. However, this is one that will benefit both students and teachers.

Another change that will come from the new system is the way in which parents are notified of of their student’s absences. Parents will now be emailed via School Loop when their student is marked absent from class. Removing paper completely from the process makes for valuable environmental efficiencies.

Students that are marked absent from class will still be expected to fill out a readmit from the attendance office in order to excuse their absence. As in previous years, parents must provide a written note for their student to recieve a readmit. The readmits are then sorted in the attendance office. But, with LBUSD’s new form of attendance, students and parents will be more aware of when the students needs to provide a readmit.

The 2014-2015 school year is the first to use this new yet valuable system. These improvements will benefit not just Poly, but schools throughout Long Beach Unified.