By Kamryn Drach

Practicing Alert, Lockdown, Inform, Counter, and Evacuate is the drill the school systems are using in case of in an emergency.

Administration informs students if there is an intruder in the building and what they need to do to keep safe, and teachers are taught what to do to keep themselves and students safe. It is important the schools are practicing what to do if ever needed to be in a lockdown.

The high school held a drill to see how students would do in a situation and to learn what to do. If there was an intruder, students have either a certain route to take to get out or a plan to barricade and hide in rooms. The decision depends on where the intruder is and where they are going. Teachers explained to classes that if their house is close they should go there.

“I didn’t know what to do, it was not planned out well,” junior Kayla Valente said.

Teachers told classes they were either running or barricading.

“I saw one class actually running,” said Sophi Perez.

Students were told they were going half way to there destination point, and instead students only went to places surrounding the school.

“We stood in the field as an easy target,” junior Kathrine Doty said.

The day before, the students were told to run halfway to their destination. Instead, they only went as far as the concession stand or trees in the field. Students were told to be serious and take this seriously and act like it was real.

People during the drill were talking, walking and carrying on. Students were told not to do those things but yet they did. It was just a drill but it could have been taken more serious.

It is a pretentious person’s favorite thing to say, “athletes get paid way too much; all they do is play a game and make millions. It is not fair.”

This may be true. According to businessinsider.com, an average professional basketball player’s salary is $5.15 million a year.

This is an enormous amount of money to play a child’s recreational game. 5.15 million dollars seems monstrous compared to payscale.com’s average yearly salary for a police officer at $56,130. An adult who risks his/her life to protect the law abiding citizens of the United States makes 8% of what an NBA player makes. Something is wrong here.

People wonder who to blame for this. They have no one to blame but themselves. The general public is the only one responsible.

The general public are the ones who pay $110 for a Joe Haden jersey. They let Nike tell them a pair of Lebron James basketball shoes are worth $250.

All of that money is not directly pocketed by Nike or whatever brand is selling it. Athletes are endorsed by companies, getting paid by the company for the athlete to wear their products and the company in turn can use their name for products or even commercials.

Oklahoma City Thunder forward Kevin Durant was recently offered $265-$285 million over 10 years by Under Armor.

Someone’s name and image should not be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is only able to happen because people are willing to pay whatever price the corporations say they will pay.

It seems like a big cycle to me. Athletes start new trends and then the big corporations will sell that trend and make huge profit off the new style, thus increasing the corporation’s profit and their ability to pay athletes these huge endorsements.  

Overpaid athletes have only the chumps overpaying for brand-name apparel to thank for their enormous salary.

By Maeonne Phillips

Many apps are blocked on the school wifi, but some can seem useless to be banned at all.

Apps like Instagram, Tumblr and sometimes Snapchat can pose a threat to some students. Cyberbullying can take place with pictures being posted, or students can come across inappropriate content.

These apps are labelled as “adult” leaving an understandable reason for the banning. Most students will complain it is still unfair and that most use it responsibly, but the reasoning behind banning them is somewhat obvious.

Even though these apps are blocked , it does not stop students from using them. Most will just turn on their data to use them briefly.

However, there is one app blocked on school wifi that does not seem to pose a threat at all which is Spotify.

Spotify is a music app in which students download as much music as they want and listen to it on shuffle with occasional ads. The only social media aspect of the app is the opportunity to share music through it by direct messaging or create playlists for others to view.

Most students are not able to listen to their music on the app unless they turn their data on, but the blocking of the app is not reliable for other reasons as well.

Spotify gives buyers the opportunity to upgrade to a premium account. When purchased, the user can listen to any given song at any given time, without the interruption of ads, for a month. In addition, they can listen on or offline.

Students who pay for the monthly subscription can easily listen to the app as much as they want without using up their data by simply turning off their wifi.

With the Spotify app being so popular, it is unfair that some students can get around it while others can not.

Not everyone has the money to pay for a monthly subscription, preventing students to listen to their music unless they pay for the app like other students do.

Completely blocking an app from a student is simply impossible. The attempt helps and definitely reduces the use, but the blocking of apps used for things such as music is not beneficial as Spotify use does not cause harm to students.

If the reason for the ban is to reduce risk of students losing focus, the ban is not successful either. Most students will find other apps, listen to what they have purchased on iTunes or even use YouTube to listen to music.

The ban of Spotify by the school is not reliable and unfair to most students.