Palo Alto High School administration is focusing on reducing student stress in the wake of a tragic suicide on the train tracks on Monday, March 9. During the following week, school psychologists and counselors walked around the Paly campus, offering emotional support for those emotionally troubled by the tragedy. School psychologists and counselors remain available to help any students who continue to struggle to cope with the loss of their peer or who face any other emotional challenges.

Looking forward, administration seeks to ensure that Paly remains a safe and supportive environment for students and hopes to prevent such tragedies in the future.

In addition to the administrations emotional support initiatives, assistant principal Victoria Kim continues to work on configuring logistics for Advanced Placement (AP) testing, which will begin on May 4. Late signups for AP tests ended on March 12. Kim is working to find proctors and allocate adequate space for each AP test depending on the number students taking each test.
Assistant principal Kathleen Laurence has begun organizing students’ schedules for the 2015-2016 school years since all course signups have been submitted.

“We’re figuring out how many sections we need of each class, what doesn’t have enough students to run, and trying to find any mistakes students made during signups,” Laurence said. “We try to minimize the number of conflicts for students, but sometimes it’s hard to build the master schedule so there’s not some conflict somewhere.”

As always, the master schedule will be a work in progress throughout the summer and administration will release schedules one to two weeks prior to the beginning of the school year and will deal with any potential errors at that time.