Epimone for Emphasis

I’ve found that sometimes you need to repeat yourself to be heard, and so I intend to re-surface the issue I contemplated in my January editorial.

On the 26th of February, Mayor Steven Bach visited Air Academy High School. He visited us on a snowy, 2-hour delayed morning to award our State Champions, the Boys’ Soccer Varsity team and Katie Rainsberger, two “Spirit of the Springs” awards. Now I don’t think I’ll be surprised to hear that a majority of the rest of the school had no idea, considering Katie herself was not even aware that she was due in the Auditorium first block, as well as a number of the boys. No less, it was class color day and one of our players sat on stage, photographed for the newspaper, in a banana suit.

Here we are, in the Auditorium, with an assortment of orange, green, and yellow on the left, Katie Rainsberger, our principal, and the Chief of the CSPD on the right, and Mayor Bach, all 6’6” of him, behind a podium in the center. Who was in the audience? About four or five members of faculty and a Journalism class of 15 students slowly trickling in.

Where did the ball drop in this communication to the rest of the school?

I find it extremely disrespectful to our Mayor, whom had prepared an entire speech in honor of these athletes, that the school was completely unaware of his presence. Even more so, there existed no support for the accomplished students on stage. In January, I spoke about how administration lacks in acknowledging some of AAHS’ most rigorous students, and I’m finding now nothing more than further evidence. Clearly this is not the ball-dropping of administration as a whole, but regardless, communication fell through the cracks somewhere along the way while passing between sources and no one bothered to dig it back up.

I don’t feel the need to spell out the same argument I wrote about two months ago and only wish to further exemplify the point I’d been trying to make. There exists a lack of support for the achievements of students, overshadowed by the focus placed on the bad. I direct you to my January editorial, For What We’re Worth, if you have not read it and encourage you to pick up on the beginning of this argument.

As far as Mayor Bach goes, well, we got an exclusive photograph with him as a class. Your loss, admin.