Saniha Shankar

Forty Redwood Middle Schools got their first taste of speech and debate at the high school level Jan. 24 at a short camp organized by speech and debate captain Varun Parmar —the first such meeting that has occurred in many years. The camp included an overview of high school speech and debate, an explanation of the events available and an introduction to public speaking.

Henry Barmeier, a senior at Princeton University and 2006 SHS alumnus, was recently named one of the 32 Rhodes Scholars in the U.S. for this year. Barmeier becomes the fourth Saratoga High graduate to be honored as a Rhodes Scholar, joining the ranks of former honorees Ankur Luther (Class of '99), who went to UC Berkeley, Betsy Masiello (Class of '99), who went to Wellesley and Chelsea Purvis, (Class of '01) who is currently attending Yale Law School.

As the holidays approach, some seniors are looking forward to all the usual traditions—trees with colorful lights, gingerbread cookies with warm milk, red-nosed reindeer and a much-awaited envelope in the mail with a college admission decision.

Applying to colleges and anxiously waiting for a reply at one's mailbox is hard enough without being blindfolded. The content of recommendation letters has been kept under lock and key—so much so that they have become a thing of mystery and anxiety to seniors. The current system is understandable—if not to students at least to teachers. It prevents kids (or their parents) from taking up arms to go to their teacher's house, knocking on their front door and demanding a recommendation letter more complimentary to their college repertoire.

Twenty hopeful students nervously sat in history teacher Margarita Morrelle's room on Oct. 13 waiting to be called in by mock trial head coach Dr. Hugh Roberts to try out for roles on this year's team. For tryouts, each student had to act out the role of a prosecution attorney, defense attorney and witness based on an evidence packet that had been given out earlier. Roberts posted the team's line-up Oct. 16, and the 17 members went straight to work the next Tuesday.

After a month of practicing, the speech and debate team officially started the season by competing at the first league tournaments of the year. The team competed at the Novice Individual Events Tournament hosted at Los Gatos on Oct. 24 and the Fall Student-Congress tournament hosted at San Lorenzo High School on Oct. 27. At the San Lorenzo Student-Congress Tournament, co-captain Keerti Shukla placed second place.

After going up by a remarkable 25 points in API scores last year, administrators, teachers and students were happy to hear that the school's 2009 score has increased by another 5 points to 933.

While most clubs wait until after Club Day to get started, the speech and debate team has already been hard at work over the summer preparing for its season, which begins Sept. 25 with the Robert Garcia Tournament at St. Francis High School.

For the first time in many years, the school has become a California Distinguished School again. “I’ve always known that Saratoga High is a distinguished and special school,” said principal Jeff Anderson, “so I decided that it was about time that we got an official recognition of it.”

Sophomore Navneet Ramesh’s hands trembled as he stood to give his pre-trial motion. With his one motion, the entire course of the trial could be changed. The Santa Clara County judge called for him to start, and he pushed in his chair, and began to argue. Intense moments like this were what students took away from the mock trial season.

After three months of practicing, the Mock Trial team competed in its first scrimmage against another school on Jan. 17 at the league tournament hosted in the Santa Clara County Office of Education. The tournament gave the prosecution and defense teams a chance to practice their cases against other teams while being judged by lawyers and Mock Trial coaches from other schools.

If you’re looking for senior Sandeep Chandrasekhar on Facebook, try typing in his new name Deep Deep Mustafa Muhammad. A rumor that colleges and universities will check Facebook profiles and use the information to make admissions decisions has caused several seniors to change their Facebook names to make it harder for colleges to find them.

With the season in full swing, the speech and debate team competed in the two-day league tournament at Milpitas High School on Nov.15 and 16th. All Individual events took place on Saturday. The competition was stiff, but sophomore Soorya Rangan broke to semi-finals in Impromptu and Sophomore Keeti Shukla advanced to semi-finals in Foreign Extemporaneous. Sophomore Vance Lindholm took fifth place in National Extemporaneous speech.

Disaster struck. Susie Q logged onto to her Facebook account and looked aimlessly for her usual sidebar and updates. But there it was, horrifying and permanent. In plain view, this new layout stared back plain, dull and bumper sticker-less. September 2008: The new Facebook was officially made mandatory for all users. The old adage goes “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” but it seems Facebook employees disagree. They changed the very functional website to a new, difficult to navigate format.

Saratoga High has historically been one of the highest ranked public high schools in California in terms of Academic Performance Index or API scores. This year, the school had a record 25-point increase in its API score, going from 903 in 2007 to 928 in 2008, outperforming rival schools like Lynbrook and Monta Vista to become one of the top three schools in the Bay Area and the top performer in the Santa Clara County. The school’s API scores have been dropping in the past couple of years, which makes this increase much more remarkable.

It was that time of year again; Extra sleep, almost no homework, and no regular classes. No, not summertime, but STAR Testing. STAR, also known as Standardized Testing and Reporting, is a statewide test given to all students between the second grade and their junior year in high school. Students in elementary and middle school test on English, Language Arts and Mathematics, while high school students cover English and math along with a section related to their current science course, sophomores and juniors take a history star test as well. To most students, STAR meant taking an easy test and going home early to enjoy a few days without any homework. What most students do not know, however, is that STAR testing can affect their future, perhaps to nearly the same degree as other standardized tests administered during their high school career.