Another school year has flown by! In a couple of weeks, it will be summer for the students of Mt. Hope High School. This summer I plan to sleep in late, hang out with my friends, go swimming and basically do nothing. However, my mother ruined my fantasy by telling me what my real plan is. She told me to get a summer job. I thought "Oh this should be easy." How wrong I was. I survived a year of auditions for orchestra and school plays, yet this didn’t prepare me for the challenge of finding a job. The first problem I encountered was that nobody seemed to be hiring. The economy is so bad right …

On March 19, Mt. Hope High School hosted the 83rd annual Rhode Island State Drama Festival for the north division of the state of Rhode Island. The Mt. Hope High School Drama Class participated in the festival along with drama classes from Bishop Hendricken High School, Saint Raphael Academy, Cumberland High School, Bay View Academy, Barrington High School, and Beacon Charter High School for the arts. I not only was a participant in the drama festival, but a host as well. I arrived at Mt. Hope at 7 a.m., which is earlier than I wake up on a school day. I had the privilege of being a tour …

Today is February 14, or better known as Valentine's Day. The day that highlights couples and love. A holiday that causes husbands and boyfriends all over the world to stress out over making sure they have the perfect gift for their special someone. At Mt. Hope High School, a person can send someone else a carnation via the school store or even a singing telegram performed by the Mt. Hope choir. You can just imagine all the love in the air at Mt. Hope High School with all the couples expressing their love, while making us single kids feel a little lonelier. But then again, I don’t want to be …

A universal struggle for all teenagers is deciding whether or not to experiment with drugs. Most kids I know fall victim to the peer pressure of doing drugs. Actually, I would say about 60-75% of kids in my own honors classes have smoked weed or done other drugs, some even do drugs on a regular basis. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I found out that some of the kids who get straight A's do drugs, I was gasping like a fish! How could they choose to drugs? They are so smart and yet they make –in my opinion- one of the dumbest decisions of their lives. Don’t they pay attention in health …

College is said to be the place where we explore who we are and find out what we want to do with our lives. Maybe yes, maybe no. Some may disagree with me, but college may not be the ideal place for self-exploration to begin. To me, high school is that place. It occured to me to consider this topic because I have two older siblings in college and I know how my parents struggle to pay the college tuition bills. With the price of college skyrocketing every year, it can prove to be a very costly four (frequently five) year experience. In college, very often you are unable to take an interesting …

Mt. Hope graduation standards keep changing, making it harder for teenagers to be able to graduate. One of the newest additions to this standard is that students now have to get at least a proficient score in NECAP testing if they wish to graduate. We take this test in our junior year along with SATs, MAPS testing, regular tests that our teachers give out, and some even take the pre-SATs again. With the number of tests that we already have to take in our junior year, I ask myself, is this really necessary? It was one thing when NECAP testing was put in place to inform teachers of student's …