News

Rumors Surrounding Senior Skip Day

Sophia Rothstein

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Photo Courtesy of Inklings News

Senior Skip Day is a celebrated day among many high school seniors across the nation. At Columbia High School (CHS), the date is rumored to be on June 8th. However, with the date quickly approaching, many current seniors have concerns.

Seniors very often arrange events through a Facebook group page. This year, this page is where Senior Skip Day was organized. However, many current seniors are not in the group, or do not even know about the page. People aren’t part of the Facebook group “because they either don’t know or don’t care about it,” said Angie Appouh, ‘18. She believes the people she knows who aren’t in the group will participate in Senior Skip Day regardless, because, “they miss class almost everyday.” Grace Cantwell-Sweeney, ‘18, said she is not part of the Facebook group, but found out through her friends. “I do plan on skipping that day,” she said.

Another issue seniors have faced in the past, and currently face, is threats from administration. According to Jason Brown, ‘17, his graduating class faced the warning from the school that if they did not attend an assembly on the date of their Senior Skip Day, they would not be allowed to attend prom. “[The assembly] was just Ms. Aaron going over graduation procedure, attendance requirements, and handing out pre-ordered yearbooks,” Brown said. The threat worked for him; he said he did not ditch class the day of Senior Skip Day because, “I was just paranoid since the school gave me 3 cuts the day before, despite being present.” Cantwell-Sweeney said, “I think [the rumored mandatory assembly] is a sad excuse to get kids to go to school. I think everyone’s just going to skip anyway.”

Despite the uncertainty and rumors surrounding Senior Skip Day, many students still plan on participating. A reason that may actually affect students’ participation is their attendance. Appouh said, “[some] people can’t afford to miss another day.”

Senior Assassins

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Allison Pearsall 

Photo Courtesy of Groupon.com
 

A tradition that the seniors at Columbia High School follow in the upcoming end to their last days at their high school includes a game known as ‘Senior Assassins’. The end of year festivities are usually organized by the school, such as prom, midnight madness etc. but this game is run by the students and the school has made it clear that they do not want to partake. The rules of the game have banned students from playing on school grounds as a result from bad behavior years before. 

Steven Pearsall, a Columbia graduate from 2011, claims that his graduating year was the first one of its tradition. “Kids would bring their [water] guns into classrooms and spray people on the lawn” The administration must’ve had a tantrum. They caught the students and declared school’s campus a “safe zone” during the game and stated that students that continue bringing guns into school will serve a suspension and if they could afford it or not, it would affect their attendance at graduation.

Basically, the game is just a very intense water gun fight. It normally results in frustration and cheating but this year, students made a smart decision to change the game and make sure all rules and teams are sorted out to a score keeper before starting. This year Ruby Bloom and Lauren Yelner There is no prize at the end only “clout” says Ruby Bloom. She, and Lauren Yelner, another 2018 senior

Facebook Visually Shrinks Fake News

Rebekah Czukoski

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Photo Courtesy of Marketing Land

As of late April, 2018, Facebook announced that now they would be shrinking unreliable news sources as to “reduce the visual prominence of feed stories that are fact-checked false,” a Facebook spokesperson confirmed to ‘The Verge.’ Since 2017 when Facebook announced an algorithm they used on their platform in order to reduce the amount of fake news, this system has been in place to send possible “fake news” to third party fact checkers to debunk.

Facebook specifically has been accused of spreading misleading information about the campaigners in the 2016 presidential election.In a study conducted by the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of Americans in 2017 are attributed to getting their news from Facebook. Some people are baffled by the lack in effort for decreasing the amount of unreliable news sources and attribute this to taking the easy way out. Isabelle Wendt, ‘18, student at Columbia High School (CHS), says that for her news, she relies on “Buzzfeed and sometimes New York Times.” In response to the announcement of Facebook literally “shrinking” their news, she says that “They shouldn’t have fake news at all. They should be getting rid of it instead of reducing the size of it.”

Users on Facebook are also responsible for creating fake Facebook accounts which contributes to the spreading of false information on this site. Other commonly used news sources have been accused of the spread of misinformation. These sites include the social media’s: Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and Buzzfeed. Nicole Franowicz, ‘18, a student at CHS also claims that she does find news on Buzzfeed, “If I’m looking for news I don’t go to Buzzfeed, when I’m on the app though I see news on there. I don’t seek out buzzfeed news, it just comes to me.” Reasons for not following social media sites for news is that information tends to be over exaggerated and often biased.

Fake Accounts Made 20 Minutes After the Suspect of a School Shooting Was Named

Svitlana Hofman

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Photo: Yi-Chin Lee, Houston Chronicle

A school shooting in Santa Fe left at least ten people dead. Twenty minutes after the suspect’s name was released, fake suspect accounts on Facebook were created.

It is unclear who created the false Facebook accounts.These scammers created many Facebook accounts using the suspected shooter’s name. Facebook took measures to control this issue, but unfortunately that did not help. The suspect’s real account and fake accounts were removed by Facebook, immediately after, new accounts were made to take their place.

These accounts were filled with misleading information such as images linking the suspect to a liberal group called Antifa. Alt-right news sites also claimed the shooter was part of the Antifa movement.

With the increasing number of U.S. school shooting, exploitation of news has been a recurring trend. Clear political agendas have been The picture on the profiles showed the suspect wearing a ‘’Hillary 2016” hat.

The fake Facebook accounts included the name of Dimitrios Pagourtzis, the 17-year-old suspect who was also a student at the high school. Police say Pagourtzis is now in custody and is under investigation.