New Five-Year Plan Aims to Decrease Disparity Between Students in the School System Stella Williams ACPS 2025, the school system’s new five-year plan, is focused on equity, which ACPS defines as “empowering students, families and staff by providing relationships and nurturing capability to collectively remove barriers that prevent anyone from achieving their aspirations.”  Since minorities have fallen behind in the past, the plan aims to narrow the achievement gap in the school system to “meet students where they are and not necessarily where we want them to be,” according to a page on the ACPS website. The data workbook for the 2025 Strategic Planning Committee shows the gap between students…

An Inclusive Safe Place for People of All Genders, Identities, and Sexualities Katie Mathews, Ginny Seidenberg and Eliza Coast There are few clubs that have been around for 25 years, but the Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA) has been around since 1994. GSA was the first club of its kind in public schools in Virginia.   The GSA works to make T.C. a more welcoming place for all its students. It strives to act as not only a place of understanding and acceptance, but also as a place of improvement for the LGBTQIA+ community within T.C.  “I first joined the GSA to find a community that was accessible to me in…

Seniors Awarded Full-Ride Scholarships to Wisconsin and Lafeyette Chris Bright and Norah Ludke Two Posse Scholarship finalists have received full-ride scholarships to top tier schools. This year’s winners are seniors Maddie Allen and Wilmer Carranza.  The Posse Foundation awards full-tuition scholarships to students with leadership talents, typically first-generation college students, for universities and colleges that the foundation partners with. “I am really happy, [this opportunity] is really awesome, and it is great for me and my family. I feel very grateful,” said Allen, who has worked hard to be noticed in her classes, extracurricular activities, and in the pool of candidates for the Posse scholarship. Allen will attend the University…

Jackie Lutz and Chris Bright Education is becoming increasingly modernized due to the introduction of the Internet and utilization of tablets, laptops, and other classroom technologies, such as the SmartBoard, an interactive whiteboard.   This change comes with an increased need for organization and accessibility to ensure that students and teachers make the most of this technology.  At T.C., teachers mainly use the Learning Management Systems (LMS) Canvas and Google Classroom to share and collect online assignments with students.  It was intended that only one of these platforms would be used, after the decision to switch from Blackboard, another LMS that ACPS used from 2005 until spring 2017. This decision…

2020 brings not only a new yearly calendar, but also a new highly contested ACPS academic calendar. Three versions of proposed academic calendars for the 2021-2022 school year are in circulation. The most disputed aspect of these calendars is their start: should they start before or after Labor Day?

T.C. teacher Kimberly Wilson was recently honored with the National Teacher of the Year Award. This award is sponsored by the Association for Career and Technical Education.

The Governor’s Health Science Academy is a new program at TC that allows students to explore the medical field and be on a fast-track to a medical education.

Abigail St. Jean Wednesday December 11, T.C.’s women in STEM club hosted a Panel Discussion featuring 4 different scientists including Dr. Brittany Brand, a volcanologist who researches volcanoes and the effects they have on societies, Dr. Ana Carnaval, a biodiversity scientist who studies DNA sequencing and fossils to understand how animals have adjusted to climate change Lindsay Aitchison is a spacesuit engineer for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The discussion was moderated by Dr. Shaena Montanari, a paleontologist, who currently works as a freelance journalist with a focus on environmental news. The women answered questions asked by Montanari and pre written questions by T.C. students. They discussed their career…

T.C. Theogony and broadcast students had the opportunity to be on PBS NewsHour to speak on the political issues they care about and ask questions for the presidential candidates to answer during the Democratic debates.