Henry Martin Gunn was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on July 7, 1898, and moved to Oregon at the age of 12. He attended the University of Oregon and received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there, serving in the Navy during World War I in the midst of his studies. He then attended graduate school at Stanford, completing a master’s degree in education before moving back to Oregon to become a principal in the Portland school system. While taking nighttime university courses there, he met his wife Thelma Eiler, an art teacher at the time. As his reputation grew, Gunn moved into the superintendent position for the Eugene School District and then transitioned to the university level, teaching education at the University of Southern California before becoming president of Western Oregon University. After three years there, PAUSD hired him as superintendent in 1950. Gunn’s foremost priority for students in the district was to improve their standardized testing performance.

He cited the fact that PAUSD students performed well above the national average in reading,writing and arithmetic as one of his proudest achievements as superintendent. Gunn also placed special emphasis on “gifted” students, creating a new program specifically to enrich those who weren’t challenged by the general education curriculum. He experimented with new educational approaches at every level, collaborating with Stanford University to bring new curricula and teaching methods to high schoolers while introducing algebra and geometry to elementary students. At the heart of his philosophy was individuality — he encouraged teachers, students, and individual schools to take their own approaches to learning, communicating amongst themselves to find novel approaches while still covering the same basic skills.

As superintendent, Gunn still remained involved in the local community: He was president of the local Rotary Club, held a position on the YMCA board of directors, and was on the executive committee of the Boy Scouts of America. Gunn also led a group of superintendent advocates to establish a local junior college district, and successfully founded the Foothill-De Anza Community College District in 1957.

In 1964, Henry M. Gunn High School, Palo Alto’s third high school at the time, welcomed its inaugural student body. Through naming the school after Gunn, district leaders hoped to pay tribute to his service to PAUSD over his 12-year tenure. Unlike the majority of Palo Alto’s schools and public buildings, however, the school was named after him while he was still living.

After leaving PAUSD in 1961, Gunn became a professor of school administration at San Jose State University and then moved to the California State Department of Education, but remained close with the district. He was the principal speaker at the school’s first graduation ceremony in 1968, and received a distinguished citizen award from the Palo Alto Chamber of Commerce.

Gunn passed away in 1988 at the age of 90 of a stroke, leaving behind a solidified legacy at PAUSD and the Palo Alto community. Former district principal Dr. Winfield Christiansen noted that his greatest gift, one that went beyond education and schooling, was “to make people believe in themselves.”

Starting in January 2025 and finishing in fall 2025, phase two — which is to convert the culinary classrooms in the K-building into two Science Labs — will start after the full completion of phase one and finish in fall 2025. This construction plan that began in the fall of 2022 included a major modernization of the administration office, cafeteria and exterior and interior dining halls. The A-building will house administration facilities, a nurse’s office, a multi-purpose room for teacher meetings and additional eating areas. The B-building will feature a Design Studio and classrooms and a kitchen for Culinary Arts.

With the new administration office’s “court- yard-like entrance”, Senior Construction Manager Mohammed Sedqi explains that its location was most suitable for parents’ and visitors’ way finding and staffs’ supervision.

“The best architecture is when you don’t need a sign saying ‘admin is there’. You want to just arrive at the parking lot and clearly know where it is,” he said. “The entrance is facing the parking lot, so it’s this new face to the school entrance that helps promote the sense of place at the school.”

The renovation work includes adding 8,000 square feet to the existing 12,000 square feet of building. During the process, the crew tackled challenges with remodeling an existing building, such as the absence of utilities lines
underground and older, incorrect spokes. Sedqi also said that potential setbacks in regulatory food space checkpoints will not be a major problem, ensuring a timely debut.

PAUSD Facilities & Construction Director Eric Holm describes that many tasks, including installations of electrical wiring, landscaping and planters, were allocated to start between the end of school and start of summer school to
prevent disruption during the school year. The construction team planned to repave the streets and repaint the main exit when summer school ended on July 19.

“We try to have the least amount of disturbance to students, so we use the summer to work outside of the fences of the building construction site,” he said. “So to connect the entire power of the buildings, we had to shut down the entire campus for three days.”

Sedqi expresses a similar sentiment.

“Because of the first winter storm that hit us hard, we had a challenging period with a mud pit in construction for months,” he said. “Otherwise, summer is when we make a lot of progress without things that hit a delay like interrupting school activity.”

Holm explains that unexpected changes and additions from the original plan range from environmental concern to improved technology.

“An example is that the contractor’s access to get things would end up damaging the trees because the building was too close, so we’ve made some modifications there,” he said. “We’ve also changed as a district. Gunn is one of our test cases for a new security system and camera system inside, so that all the doors are Access Reader on this building, and you won’t need any keys to get into the building.”

For future projects, Gunn may consider cross-laminated timber, a material built from sustainably harvested big wood lumber, as used in rebuilding Herbert Hoover Elementary School in March of 2024.

“The cool thing about mass timber, which is cross laminated timber, is it being the new zero carbon footprint technology,” Sedqi said. “It’s a really good direction, and if that is successful, that might be a prototype for future projects.”

For Sedqi, whose role in construction stemmed from a childhood of building Legos, he finds it rewarding to be able to connect with students and teachers, like food services and CTE Instructional Lead and culinary science teacher Cindy Peters, to execute campus facilities or that elevate each part of the community.

“I’m proud of the culinary classroom and kitchen because I have had a lot of meetings with Cindy. If you’ve been to her class, she’s been there for roughly 20 to 30 years and it’s outdated. So I like when she’s on site and says, ‘I’m happy about this. I want to teach here.’” he said. “It’s for her and for all the students. You’re gonna get some place that is
like cooking in a place that looks like a five star restaurant. It feels really good.”

While construction is continual with interior design efforts such as installing flooring, ceiling lights and kitchen equipment; painting the walls; and putting in attack panels, Assistant Principal of Facilities Dr. Mycal Hixon points out that the administration is focused on finding ways to better students’
environments and fulfill their needs.

“It allows us to continue to support students in the best, most efficient and safest way possible,” he said. “It finally allows for a cafeteria dining space during rainy day weather and is air conditioned for students to have lunch. That definitely means a lot for Gunn, while meeting all the measures and safety disciplines as best as administration
can.”

Gallery • 1 Photos

Photo courtesy of Brandon Seow

A Taser alarm: It may sound slightly odd, but it’s what sophomore Brandon Seow spent six weeks of his summer on.

Following a weeklong family vacation to French Polynesia, Seow took two engineering classes in hopes of creating a portfolio before applying to the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, or COSMOS, next summer. It was in his first class, a six-week course on engineering fundamentals at West Valley College, that he and his groupmates decided to create an alarm that stunned its user prior to going off.

The proposal was initially a joke, according to Seow. “It was right in the beginning (of the course) when we were supposed to shout out ideas to the group,” he said. “One of my peers shouted out ‘Taser alarm,’ which sounded funny at first, but somehow the teacher accepted it.”

During the class, Seow and his groupmates created a design, ordered the necessary parts — including electrode patches and wires to hook to phones — and then assembled the contraption. Though Seow’s work mainly involved writing code, he also aided with the physical engineering.

With limited supplies and an unavailable teammate, alongside a slew of bugs typical of an engineering project, Seow’s group faced its fair share of troubles. “We waited for a while longer than we should have to start building (the alarm) in real life — putting the parts together — because we had to do a lot of prior research,” he said. “Our project was one of the harder ones out of all the groups’.”

Still, the team was able to troubleshoot and ended up finishing on time. Beyond engineering skills, Seow also gained friendships from the course. “It’s fun because I get to meet students of all ages,” he said. “I have friends there who are in college, past college and going to be a junior (in high school) next year. So being able to talk with them and relate to them is nice.”

Overall, Seow appreciated the versatility of the class, which always kept him interested: From circuit building to coding Arduino, there was always something new to learn. “Every day is just a little different,” he said.

Rishay Jain: Astrophysics internship

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Photo courtesy of Rishay Jain

Senior Rishay Jain’s work touched the stars at his Lockheed Martin internship this summer, where he studied solar flares: explosions of electromagnetic radiation or plasma from the sun that can travel up to 3,000 kilometers a second. “If, by chance, this plume of material hits the Earth, and is able to penetrate Earth’s protective magnetic field, we could be severely impacted,” he wrote in an interview follow-up note. “Astronauts would be in extreme danger, air force/military operations could be interrupted, and civilians could experience power and communications blackouts.”

Through working in the Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, Jain is developing an application that helps scientists track solar flares and their evolution. His tool analyzes photos of the sun’s surface to detect where, when and how often flares occur, with the goal of predicting them more accurately.

Jain’s application builds on the work of previous Gunn interns at Lockheed Martin. They, like him, were part of the decadeslong joint program that sends a few rising seniors from Gunn to intern at the company during their junior-to-senior-year summer. “While I’ve learned a lot of new concepts for my projects at Lockheed, I have to apply nearly everything I’ve learned in the rigorous math, science and engineering courses I’ve taken at Gunn, using everything from vector math from Analysis to electromagnetic waves from chemistry and physics, and even computer-vision/-programming techniques from GRT (Gunn Robotics Team),” Jain wrote.

At networking events, Jain has been able to learn from the people who work at Lockheed. During the 10-year-anniversary celebration of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, a NASA sun imager, he heard about the project’s challenges and highlights firsthand. “There’s more than just engineering,” he said. “There’s a lot of people that go into these projects, and there’s a lot of collaboration and teamwork spirit.”

Jain will continue to add more features to his application to analyze different types of data over the next eight months of his internship. “There are real-world impacts to the kind of work that happens over there,” he said.

Beverly Lamis: Circus camp counselor and lifeguard

Gallery • 1 Photos

Photos courtesy of Beverly Lamis

Junior Beverly Lamis juggled the demands of two jobs and walked the tightrope of responsibility this past summer. A counselor at 888 Monkeys Circus Camp and a lifeguard at Greenmeadow Pool and Community Center, Lamis both taught and supervised children, learning new skills along the way.

Lamis and her twin brother, Jack Lamis, made a last-minute decision to become counselors at the camp after hearing about the opportunity from stage tech teacher Jennifer Ellington, who is also one of the directors of the camp. At the camp, the twins taught circus arts — trapeze, juggling, acrobatics, stilts and more — to kids aged 5 to 14.

As a counselor, Lamis ran stations that students rotated through, each focusing on a different skill. “We’re teaching the kids how to do it and pushing them further than what they think they can do,” she said. “For the (skills that require balance), it’s a lot of just spotting the kids because they’re pretty young.”

At performances, Lamis got to see her teaching and the students’ hard work pay off. “By the end of the week, most kids are able to do whichever (skills) they really tried hard at,” she said. “Usually, at the end of the week, we show all of the skills that they learned to the parents.”

The stories her boss told and the specialists the camp brought in gave Lamis a newfound understanding of circus life. “It’s been a surreal experience,” she said. “My boss, he’s part of the circus, so it’s opened my eyes to a whole different volume of life living (as) part of the circus and having to be on the go all the time.”

Apart from her full-day job as a camp counselor, Lamis set aside time to complete summer homework in preparation for classes, go to the gym and work at the Greenmeadow Community Center, where she watched over swimmers as a lifeguard and did maintenance work around the pool and bathrooms.

Despite younger students’ temper tantrums and unruliness, Lamis loved working with them. “It’s really fun to teach them how to do something and then watch them succeed and build on it,” she said. “They always just love to show you the littlest things, and it’s so fulfilling seeing the joy on their faces after they’ll get one trick, and they’ll start to get it over and over again.”

These changes follow a May altercation at JLS in which a student injured two teachers, leading to increased community concern over behavioral support for students with social-emotional and physical learning impairments. At the May 23 school board meeting, Director of Special Education Amanda Boyce noted rising concerns surrounding elementary student behavioral dysregulation in the past few years, especially after a return from remote learning.

Teachers present at the school board meeting said they had received inadequate district support on managing dysregulated behaviors when they faced similar situations in past years. Parent Steven Davis also voiced skepticism about the resources students and staff received to follow behavior plans such as individualized educational plans and 504 plans, which provide learning accommodations for students with disabilities. “When 10% of our kids are students with disabilities, yet they are 50% of our suspensions, something is basically broken,” he said at the meeting.

To address these concerns, the district launched a third-party investigation at JLS to analyze the district’s current behavioral-support measures and find areas of improvement. PAUSD also hired additional BICs to fill the shortage in behavior staff and established the district’s second middle school therapeutic-services program, which will provide additional specialized support and counseling for students who require it according to their IEPs. This therapeutic-services program will be established at Fletcher Middle School, on top of existing programs at Greene Middle School, Duveneck Elementary School and Palo Alto High School.

According to Behavioral Support Services Manager Nestor Ramos, BICs serve to provide proper behavioral support and management to de-escalate crisis situations, such as physical or mental breakdowns. “For example, if the student ran out of the classroom or they’re targeting another peer, the BIC would step in,” Ramos said. “If they’re familiar with the student, they would implement (specific behavioral) interventions for that student. If not, they would move the student to a private place, clear the area, or whatever measures are best. They are the first line of defense, coordinating everything as needed.”

BICs collect data to help create behavior-intervention plans, specific actions and goals staff can take to improve dysregulated behavior in students. “We look at possible functions for maladaptive behaviors and the reasons the behaviors are happening,” Ramos said. BICs can also teach staff how to implement behavioral strategies in classrooms.

The district is looking into creating ad hoc committees of teachers and parents for more input on implementing behavior-support measures that will meet students’ needs. According to Boyce, they are also exploring partnerships with local organizations to further inform parents whose families need behavioral support.

Currently, the district is creating new training curricula to teach staff preventative measures and de- escalation techniques. On Aug. 21, they will host a district-wide training for all staff. “All staff — secretaries, teachers, custodians — can step in,” Ramos said. “We want to make sure they’re aware how they can be supportive of students in these scenarios and maybe prevent some situations.”

One way that students can get a head start on the semester is to firmly ground themselves in their new reality. Many tend to fall into a state of denial that their beloved summer break has ended. Common symptoms of this mentality include oversleeping, since students’ bodies have been conditioned over the last several months to sleep in until noon; an inability to track the days of the week; and severely decreased attention spans. This state of being, however, is counterproductive to academic success. Thus, accepting that summer is over is critical. A student could host a funeral to mourn the passing of summer break and invite all of their friends and family to come pay their respects. Or perhaps they might seclude themself in a room with a speaker that repeatedly shouts “SUMMER BREAK IS OVER.” Whatever the method, both a conscious and subconscious understanding of the current existence of school in daily life must be reached.

Another way one may be able to quickly readjust to life with school is to practice several lost skills. While it’s true that there wasn’t a good reason to log into Schoology or Infinite Campus for the majority of summer besides checking new schedules, that’s no excuse to become rusty with them. Spending time practicing tasks in Schoology such as submitting assignments or checking grades can save time later down the road. One fun way to reacquaint oneself with these tools is to find a friend and race to see who can navigate certain tasks — opening a new Google Doc or logging in to the Palo Alto Unified School District ID portal — faster.

As intimidating as it may seem, connecting with teachers can also help with readjustment to the school climate. Chances are that they’re just as disappointed as you, if not more, about the disappearance of summer. This mutual loss serves as excellent common ground upon which one can comfortably engage teachers in conversation. After all, teachers are people too — not just seasonal phenomena.

Gallery • 3 Photos

Photos by Victor Dang, graphics by Chinyoung Shao

“I loved seeing the beautiful and intricate architecture in London and Paris.”

“My mom and I were big fans of Monet’s and Renoir’s art growing up, so it was amazing to see their original pieces in person.”

Science teacher Mark Brassey in Costa Rica

“We went to one place called Nosara, which is on the Pacific coast. It was about 100 kilometers from the airport, but it took us four hours to drive there (because) the roads were pretty bad. We had to cross rivers in the Jeep we had and we were in (a) four-wheel drive a lot of the time, so it was a pretty remote (area). But when we got there, it had a really distinct local culture.”

“(There was a) very slow lifestyle. No one was in a hurry to do anything, so it was very calming.”

Sophomore Roy Lao in Beaverton, Oregon

Lao went to Oregon for a diving competition with the Santa Clara Diving Club

“(The Tillamook Cheese Factory) was really cool … there were these big windows where you could see them making cheese.”

“We went to a big rose garden. It was huge and just all color. It smelled nice and there were really fat squirrels. They were not scared (of us) — they just sat there eating, (which was) really funny.”

Senior Chania Rene-Corail in New Haven, Connecticut

Rene-Corail participated in the Young Global Scholars program at Yale University

“(The highlight) was definitely being able to live on campus. The school is really gorgeous. I didn’t expect it to be that nice.”

“I was in a specific program about international relations, and we had some group projects where we tried to solve one main global challenge. Other than that, we also had something called ‘family time,’ which was meant to help us meet more people in the program.”

Junior Olivia Lu in Japan and Korea

“I went to this deer park in Nara, Japan, and we got to feed them. I also went to a mountain where you would climb all the way to the top. There was a monkey park there too, so I got to play with the monkeys. There were a lot of cute animals everywhere.”

“Japan was one of my favorite trips, but something I would have liked to do more is going to more smaller towns and explore the culture there instead of going shopping.”

P.E teacher Amy Anderson in St. Lucia

“A lot of people on the island could not swim… And so the women that worked (at the villa) brought their children and grandchildren, and one of the women actually got in the pool with us too. We taught her, her two girls and a couple of the other family members of one of the other women (to swim and be water-safe).”

“This (vacation) was very restorative. My body felt good because we were so active and my heart felt full because I was with my friends. My mind felt very clear and very present, and it was wonderful to get to know a different culture.”

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