The Burlingame varsity football team is experiencing a decline in participation this year at the varsity level, with about 15-20 kids choosing not to return to the team this year, according to varsity head coach John Philipopoulos.

The Burlingame Police Department plans to implement the use of body cameras on all street officers by the end of October due to growing local and national concerns about police force.

Peninsula Alternative High School is ditching the “alternative” component of its name due to a new policy mandating that all students falling behind in credits in San Mateo High School District schools attend the continuation school. PHS’s new status contrasts their former alternative school status, in which students were able to choose whether to attend the school, even if they were determined to be at high risk for completing an inadequate number of credits for graduation.

The chatter and excitement filled the air as the days drew closer to April 22 for one of the most highly anticipated events of the year: prom. Dressed in style, seniors and juniors headed off to San Francisco’s Hotel Nikko in the evening to dance to the theme “As the Lights Go Down in the City.”

In the fall of 2017, San Francisco will be the first city in the country to offer free community college to all of its residents. Unlike New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposal, which would offer free tuition at all public universities in the state with the help of income taxes, City College of San Francisco is free regardless of income.

Over spring break, Burlingame High School students Eileen Kohli and Jackson Gravagno embarked upon the Sojourn to the Past trip, a journey that takes students to see civil rights monuments and meet civil rights leaders. The trip begins in Atlanta, Georgia and moves through Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

Dr. Marci Bowers is a pelvic and gynecologic surgeon who has performed 1600 gender reassignment surgeries, 400 hysterectomies, and thousands of other surgeries throughout her decades-long career. She is world renowned for pioneering gender reassignment surgery and is one of few physicians worldwide who perform the surgical reversal of female genital mutilation (FGM) free of cost.

The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, House of Cards—all of these shows have millions of followers and have influenced our culture at BHS immensely. The television industry as a whole is experiencing a multitude of successful shows and the birth of a new competitive market where certain TV shows are achieving levels of success that shows in previous years have never seen before.

Jacob Cohen will spend a month backpacking this summer in Canada. Specifically, he will be backpacking in the Yukon territory--a sparsely populated, mountainous region that includes multiple national parks.

Recently, at the senior meeting–an annual gathering where the administration explains expectations and events for the graduating class–Principal Paul Belzer revealed plans for making graduation gowns one color, rather than allowing students to choose between red and white. Traditionally at BHS, males tend to pick red graduation gowns, and females tend to pick white graduation gowns. 

Cheating in high schools is nothing new. It has been going on since schooling began. But at Burlingame, students and teachers alike believe that cheating is more rampant than ever.

With college acceptance letters being sent out in March, many seniors are anxious to hear if they got into their top-choice school. All of the pressure and stress that built up during the application process is now reappearing as students wait for their letters.

From March 17-18, the advanced drama class participated in the Ohlone High School Theatre Festival at Ohlone College in Fremont. The class brought over 20 entries, including a mini-musical, a one act play, and three videos.

BHS’s Model United Nations Club attended the annual Berkeley Model United Nations (BMUN) conference from March 3 through 5. The conference attracts over 1,600 high school students from all over the world is held at the UC Berkeley campus. The BMUN challenges students to debate pressing international issues from the perspective of an assigned country and hopes to encourage further discussion of international problems among young people.

From Friday, March 10 to Sunday, March 12, BHS actors and crewmembers presented Letters to Sala, a remarkable story of a young girl’s survival during wartime Germany through over 350 hidden letters.

On February 23, the Burlingame Choir gave their annual Spring Concert, in conjunction with the San Mateo Choir. The concert was held at the San Mateo High School Performing Arts Center.

The Opening Doors Club, a group of students concerned about the economic struggles of the many young people in the Bay Area, raised more than $1200 for homeless youth at Covenant House California in Oakland during their first annual February fundraiser. This money gives homeless youth direct relief, various educational tools, and other resources to help them graduate high school and live independent lives.

The Burlingame Rotary Club is partnering with its sister club, the Rotary Club of Tokyo Edogawa in Tokyo, Japan, to sponsor a summer exchange program for four high school students in Burlingame. This will be the second time that the Rotary Club has taken students to Japan; the program was started in 2015, and Japanese students visited Burlingame the following year.

Zack Israelit, a senior at Burlingame High School, cofounded the company Cosaint this past summer at a Stanford business program. Cosaint is a startup, run entirely by high school students, that specializes in wearable technologies to help prevent rape. Thus far, Cosaint has focused on a bracelet product. This bracelet works in a simple yet elegant way: when people are in a dangerous situation, they pull a part of the bracelet, sending a signal to police and other authorities.

Mills High School alumnus J. Craig Venter, Ph.D., founder and CEO of the non-profit genomic research organization J. Craig Venter Institute, the co-founder and chairman of Human Longevity Inc., and the co-founder, co-chief scientist, and chairman of Synthetic Genomics Inc., came back home on January 25 to share with Mills High students and the local community his life and groundbreaking scientific discoveries.

The graduation requirement for Career Technical Education classes that give students the opportunity to learn practical and career-oriented skills began for freshmen during the 2013-2014 school year.  The San Mateo Union High School District describes that, “CTE is offered by the District as career and workforce preparation for high school students, preparation for advanced training, and the upgrading of existing skills.”

The BHS Robotics team’s build season has begun, and around 70 members of the robotics team are hard at work building a robot that can compete in this year's FIRST STEAMworks challenge. Every year, the FIRST organization (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) creates a new, unorthodox challenge that prompts robotics teams to design a robot that is able to accomplish the challenge more efficiently than any other robot in the competition.

Last November, freshman Huyana Mumby and her family joined thousands of other Native Americans in North Dakota to protest the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a $3.8 billion oil pipeline that would run from North Dakota to Illinois.