Making friends in high school has proven difficult for some students, and this has only worsened without in-person connections. To ensure students remain focused during class, teachers sometimes disable the attendee-attendee chat function, leaving students’ means of connecting with new people virtually severed.

Still, students have found ways to connect despite the distance. One such method is by joining the school-wide Discord server, an online hangout where over 450 verified Gunn students can converse with each other and make new friends. The server was created in May 2020, in part to create a space where people could talk to each other despite being barred from in-person contact. It is complete with automated helper bots, daily community updates and even an announcement channel named after Student Activities Director Lisa Hall.

Because the server is completely run by Gunn students, moderators are appointed to keep the server in check. Moderator and senior Serena Li finds that regulating the server is usually quite simple. “As an admin, we have to moderate the chat and delete messages because people can be weird online,” she said. “Recently, though, we haven’t had to do that very often.”

The server is used for many purposes, such as coding modifications in #n-building and sharing artwork in #m-building. Most importantly, it is a means by which students can make new friends and forge new connections. “There is a lot more interclass communication here, where seniors and freshmen might not talk otherwise,” Li said. “It really helps people make new friends, and I personally have done so through this server.”

In addition to making friends with other classmates, the typical Gunn community also involves the relationships built between students and teachers. In a normal school year, math teacher Rachel Congress likes to greet students as they walk into every class. “Even small interactions like that have disappeared,” she said. “That’s hard because I think it’s important to know all of you and see all of you–not just see visually, but seeing you as a person, and understanding you as a person.”

Many teachers open their classes with a question to answer, prompting students to participate and share a tidbit about their lives in the Zoom chat. To Congress, an important aspect of building community is maintaining this practice for the duration of the class, past the initial introduction phase. “Sometimes we assume that everyone knows each other from the introductions in the first month of school, but that’s not really true,” she said. “So having those kinds of get-to-know-you activities throughout the year is really valuable to me.”

For Congress and many other teachers, the transition to online school and the rearranging of content has already been a time-consuming struggle. “It’s hard to split my focus to so many things like building community when I’m also running classes and organizing the curriculum,” Congress said. “Sometimes I have to tell myself to stop and take a break. I have to remind myself that I can’t do everything, no matter how much I want to.”

Even over Zoom classrooms and online chat servers, the Gunn community has continued to grow and develop, bringing with it the hope and strength needed to carry students past the temporary distance and back into schools. While we still can’t laugh with our friends face-to-face or raise physical hands in class, the teachers and students at Gunn have proven that friendships can still be maintained and new ones formed, reaching past the computer screen to connect with each other.

By dividing the student body into two groups and allowing them the option of attending classes over Zoom while on campus or staying home, the reopening plan aims to return students and staff to secondary school campuses as early as March 1.  

Staff members were dissatisfied by the fact that the district chose to not consult them in formulating the revised plan. “It seems irresponsible to me to come up with a plan without consulting the two people it affects the most, the student and the teacher,” English teacher Kate Zavack said. “We’re the ones who are going to be living with this reality.” 

Palo Alto Educators Association President Teri Baldwin was similarly dismayed at a lack of teacher and student voice in the decision-making process. “From what I heard from the students that called into the [Tuesday night] board meeting and from the two student board members, it did not appear that students had much of a voice in this plan at all,” she wrote in an email. “I know that teachers did not have a voice in it. We have many safety questions, [including one] about their plan to keep so many people on one campus without any cohorts.”

Baldwin, who was not involved in the planning process, said she found out about the reopening plan a few hours before the plan was announced to the public. 

Many staff members are also unsure whether the health precautions mentioned by Austin will effectively address risks tied to returning. “We still see everyone, so if one of the teachers gets COVID, then it’s easy for us to spread to other people,” social studies teacher Warren Collier said. 

Math teacher Rachel Congress echoed Collier. “I want to be back on campus as much as I think most people do,” she said. “However, I have concerns about my safety; I have concerns about [students’] safety.”

For some teachers, getting vaccinated is a determining factor in returning to campus; under Austin’s plan, teachers do not have to be vaccinated before resuming in-person instruction. “I would have liked at least the guarantee [that] all teachers and staff are vaccinated before anything happens,” Collier said. “It does not feel like [the district has] our safety as the first priority. Also frustrating is why they are so adamant about getting back to school when it’s very clear that a lot of people are not comfortable with that.” 

English teacher Mark Hernandez, also raised concerns about the reopening plan. “If all teachers had vaccines, this would be a much different deal.” 

Ultimately, teachers spoke to a sense of being unprepared to reopen—and “betrayed,” as Congress put it—given that Austin previously announced in-person instruction would be “highly unlikely” to resume for the remainder of the school year. “For distance learning, we went to trainings [and] to professional development,” Congress said. “Now we’re going to do this totally new thing. We can’t just turn on a dime; we need to have time to plan this all out.”

Hernandez agreed. “I think a lot of us took what Dr. Austin said about having distance learning for the remainder of the school year—we took him [to] his word,” he said. “So this was shocking. We’re unready for this, that’s for sure.”

On March 19 and 20, a team of two researchers from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) will come to Gunn for a mid-cycle checkup of the six-year accreditation process. According to WASC, the purpose of the accreditation process is to assure the community that a school’s purpose is appropriate and being accomplished, and to provide valuable insight from the fellow educators that visit the school. The chairperson of the midpoint checkup in March will be Irvington High School math teacher Michelle Lau, who will be looking for progress on goals and areas of improvement established in 2015.

There are multiple parts to the mid-cycle preparation team. The administration, the Instructional Council, parents and students on Site Council and the Student Executive Council are currently working on collecting data and evidence from different departments. The information gathered will be compiled into reports for the visitors. Social studies teacher Tara Firenzi is a key member in the report-writing process, acting as a coordinator for all WASC-related activities.

When the visiting team arrives in March, they will check for progress based on their observations and evidence from the school’s report.

In past years, WASC has shown a dramatic shift in focus, moving from a teacher-oriented academic environment to a student-oriented one. During an accreditation training that Principal Kathleen Laurence attended, WASC emphasized that they weren’t just looking for a list of accomplishments. “What they’re saying now, because they’re student-centered, is that we want to see what you’ve done, but more than that we want to see evidence and that you to have analyzed that evidence to show how it’s impact student-learning,” Laurence said.

The three main goals that Gunn established in 2015 were to develop a culture that embraces multiple paths to success and promotes social-emotional well-being, increase achievement for historically underrepresented students and create a more efficient data collection system. Now, three years into the accreditation, Gunn is looking at how much progress have been made and what needs to be done in the next three years to reach their goals in 2021.

The WASC preparation teams are also looking at the aforementioned areas of improvement and assessing their relevance to the school. While Gunn has the option to strategically abandon one of the goals made in 2015 if they feel that it isn’t applicable anymore, Laurence sees that as an unlikely path. “It may be not so much that the goal is going to change, but how we’re going to get there is going to change,” she said.

To address the goal of creating a more efficient data collection system, teachers meet every Monday during their weekly collaboration time, where they compile data retrieved from student assessments and inspect the essential learning outcomes and targets. Reflecting WASC’s shift towards student-centered academic environments, teachers then evaluate whether students are doing well in their learning environment or not. Laurence noted how teachers are learning by teaching their students. “It’s kind of interesting because the professional learning communities are really about the teacher learning,” she said. “[They’re trying to make] changes in their behavior and instructional strategies that then impact student learning.”

Gunn is also concentrating efforts on increasing student voice, an area of improvement indicated by WASC in 2015. Laurence and Advanced Placement (AP) Statistics teachers Daisy Renazco and Rachel Congress saw the annual AP Statistics survey project as the perfect opportunity to tackle the goal of increasing student input. “This is a project that we’ve always done in statistics and I refined it to have it be what is it is now, which is about improving the school,” Renazco said.

The survey project’s focus was refined to reflect these overarching questions: “How can we develop a plan to improve the experience of Gunn High School students and how would you redesign the school to improve the experience of students?” Within this theme, students were free to pursue any niche they had interest in. Some students looked at balance of life, some at school lunches and others at the effect of parental pressure on students’ academic performance. Junior Nicholas Wong chose to focus his survey topic around the technology-oriented school that Gunn has become. “We did [the survey] based on electronics because technology is used a lot during school and we wanted to see if there could be improvements,” he said.

The completed project was presented on Dec. 7 in the library, and some of the data will go into the reports compiled for the WASC mid-cycle checkpoint. As a student, Wong sees this project as a good opportunity to further incorporate students into school processes. “[I felt] that it was a good way to get student input on things that could improve Gunn, since all groups had the ability to choose which topic they wanted to survey students on,” he said.

This project is just one of many different strategies taken to address the issue of lack of student input, and the opportunity to enrich student learning and improve the school simultaneously is one that Renazco cherishes. “Learning is more relevant when you can see why we learn what we learn,” she said. “This is why we learn statistics, and I hope to continue to make learning relevant for my students.”

The team of two researchers, upon concluding their visit, can return in a year’s time if they deem insufficient progress has been made in Gunn’s goals and areas of improvement. “We’ve done a lot of really good work here [in the past three years], and I would feel terrible if that happened, but I don’t think it will,” Laurence said.

Math teacher Rachel Congress arrived home one night in 2010 to the smell of gas filling her house. She found her then-husband intoxicated at the stove, cooking dinner over an ignited burner that had not lighted its flame. Her husband had lacked a sense of smell from his youth, and this combined with his drunkenness meant he hadn’t noticed the amount of gas permeating the room.

Congress married her first husband in 2009 after six years of dating. “When I married him, I was pretty sure that things were good,” she said. “But when you’re with someone for a long time, people just kind of expect you to get married. If you don’t want to get married, they tend to question it a lot of the time. I mostly was happy, but there was this little voice at the back of my head that was like, ‘Is this really what you want?’”

Though her husband drank more and more over the course of their relationship, his alcoholism didn’t fully take root until after the wedding. Right after the marriage, Congress said, he would come home and have a lot to drink in addition to already drinking on the side. When she asked him about it, he would brush her off, saying it wasn’t a big deal, or lie and said he hadn’t had any drinks. Many a night she would arrive at their house and find him glazed over or passed out.

“I don’t know if it was the wedding that changed him or if after the wedding he thought, ‘Oh I don’t have to worry anymore,’ but definitely after the wedding, it was not okay,” Congress said. “It had gone to a whole other level, and I started to get really stressed about the fact that I couldn’t trust him.”

Congress and her husband were labeled the “perfect couple” by many of their friends, and people observing from the outside always saw them as being happy and together for a long time. “After the divorce, I had some people commenting to me that it shook their foundations of their relationship when they saw us get divorced,” she said. “So I definitely felt like I was put in that situation, where we were on a pillar, and everybody was looking to us like the perfect couple, which was totally unrealistic.”

The situation snowballed out of control, but Congress didn’t feel like she could reach out to any of her friends. Because of their status as a perfect couple, she felt trapped.

“I definitely felt like I was put in that situation, where we were on a pillar, and everybody was looking to us like the perfect couple, which was totally unrealistic.”

The breaking point occurred a year after the wedding, when the couple went on a camping trip with a couple of friends. Congress’s husband disappeared into the woods to play tag with a few children on site, and when he didn’t return with them, “it’s harsh of me to say, but at that point I was like I don’t care,” Congress said. “He can do whatever he wants. I had so much on me to take care of him. I kind of just hit a wall and said, ‘I don’t care. He’ll come back eventually.’”

He remained absent for about an hour, and finally, some people began to ask, “Where is he?” The party went out into the woods and found him lying unconscious in a ditch with a bloody gash across his forehead. “I thought he was dead,” Congress said. “I started having a panic attack and hyperventilating. All of the stress that had been building up over the course of a year or more really hit me at that point.”

Congress ended up watching over her intoxicated husband throughout the night to ensure that he wouldn’t fall into a coma or further hurt himself. Since they were out in “the middle of nowhere,” they couldn’t easily take him to a hospital. Congress’s friends, however, refused to see the gravity of the situation.

“It really sent a bad message to me that a lot of my friends were like, ‘It’s not a big deal,’” she said. “These people at the time that I considered my friends couldn’t understand why I was freaking out, why I lost it, and why I was sobbing and worried that he was potentially dead.” They went back to partying, and no one checked with her to see if she was okay.

Her friends’ lack of empathy would later play into a bigger problem after the divorce.

The next night, Congress confronted her husband. “I said to him, ‘I can’t do this. This is so hard. We need to go get marriage counseling. You need to go to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), you need to get help. This is not working for us,’” she said.

They attended counseling for a month, and after three sessions, her husband admitted he had a drinking problem. “He said how much he had been drinking on the sly, and it was double the amount I suspected and four times the amount what he told me or what I saw,” she said. “It was really shocking, and you doubt yourself when the person you married is lying to you that much.”

Even so, he would not attend AA and wasn’t willing to change his lifestyle. Finally, they called off their marriage. “I was relieved,” Congress said, “but I was also weighed down by this tremendous guilt of: we had had this big wedding a year-and-a-half before, we were on this pillar where everyone thought we were the perfect couple, we couldn’t make it work, we had just gotten married…” His family asked why she couldn’t stick it out while she questioned if she had expected too much and buried herself in negative cycles of self-doubt.

Though her family was supportive, her friends were not. They all took his side after the divorce, Congress said. “There were some very nasty things said to me,” she said. “About a month [after the divorce], I told some friends, ‘I’m really lonely, I need some support,’ and one of my friends said, ‘Oh, just get a pet.’ I didn’t feel like that’s how friends should support someone when they’re going through something that traumatic.”

Eventually, her friends stopped calling, and Congress was living alone for the first time in her life. “I’m a very social person; I like to be around people,” she said. “And suddenly to have hardly any friends and to be living by myself and to have to do things by myself, like go out to dinner by myself, it was really stressful and agonizing for me. I started to get really depressed and kind of hit rock bottom.”

She was already seeing a therapist at the time of her divorce, but the abrupt loss of companionship maximized her loneliness and isolation. And though she loved and loves her job, teaching became extraordinarily difficult. “If you don’t want to teach, the kids aren’t going to want to learn, so you have to constantly be excited,” she said. “I do love what I teach, but to be going through such a traumatic time and to have to put on this happy, excited, energetic persona was exhausting.”

Looking back, she acknowledges she should have taken time off work to recuperate and alleviate her stress, but she put on a brave face because she didn’t want to be an embarrassment. “It was too hard to handle the depression and fear of abandonment and living alone and having to keep up appearances and do work at the same time,” she said. “At the time, it was like something has got to give.”

One day, she decided she couldn’t keep living the way she was. She wanted to be able to live the way she wanted to be—healthy. She confided in her sisters, who reassured her things would get better, and that bit of encouragement was what she needed to keep going. Her therapist suggested getting involved with Meetup groups as a way to make new friends, and the first Meetup she found, coincidentally enough, was a divorce support group that met every Monday at the Menlo Park Presbyterian Church.

Congress went with trepidation, but the first thing the group told her was that they were not there to convert anybody; they were there to listen and support. “People come for all kinds of reasons: they come because they’ve gotten divorced, they come because they’ve been in relationships and it’s not working or maybe they don’t have an issue but want to know what doesn’t work to avoid those issues,” she said. “They started with that, so it was like, ‘Oh, okay, maybe this will really work for me.’”

Soon enough, Congress was going every week. The first hour of each session was structured in the form of education, with guest speakers and video series on a range of topics related to divorce. The second hour consisted of sitting in the style of AA and telling your personal story while everybody else listens.

“It’s totally nonjudgmental. You talk through what you’re going through, and through talking about it, you process what you’re going through. It’s not someone giving you advice,” Congress said. “And then you also listen to other people’s stories and identify with them on your own as opposed to having to have a conversation with someone. It’s very cathartic and very low-stress and also very powerful.”

One session on codependency in a family dynamic provided a particular insight. Codependency, Congress says, is when one party sacrifices themselves to support the other, whether that’s a significant other or a family member. Through learning about codependent relationships, Congress realized that she had grown up in a codependent family and that all her previous friendships and relationships had contained elements of codependency, where she admitted “I was trying to do more than I should have or I wanted to fix someone or make someone be something that they’re not.”

Because she grew up in a codependent environment, she had been subconsciously attracted to similar types of situations. “It was an aha moment of I could see why I had those friends, I could see why I dated those people,” she said. “And then you stop blaming the other person and you start looking inward and seeing what mistakes you made to put yourself in that situation, but it’s not about self-blame; it’s about seeing the patterns that are happening.”

Through other events and Meetups, Congress found new friends who could fully and completely support her—not just have fun and then ignore when times get hard. She became aware of her perfectionistic tendencies and fear of abandonment and started practicing mindfulness in her daily life, where she would sit down, be still, tell herself that she’s okay, that this will pass, and appreciate what she did have. “Before, I felt like having friends made me happy,” she said. “But I had to learn to be okay with myself and to do things because I want to as opposed to finding friends to do them with.”

Eventually, she met a new partner through a Meetup event and began dating. They recently married. “He and I have healthy dynamics,” she said. “We have serious, budgeted time apart, and we didn’t move in together because I didn’t want to be alone; we made a conscious choice to take that step for our relationship.”

Though Congress received a lack of support from her friends during and after the divorce, she encourages students to be optimistic about confiding in friends and reach out first to see how they respond. “It’s cool to have fun with friends, but if nobody will be a support network for you when you need it, try to find some who will,” she said.

In hindsight, Congress says that opening up to her family earlier in the ordeal would have helped her feel less emotionally alone. Her sisters became pillars of strength when she was cut off from her friends, and while they too expressed surprise at her divorce, they were the ones who ultimately guided her to a better place.

Though she is still a work in progress, she credits her growth over the last few years to her divorce support group. “I’m proud of how strong I’ve been, being able to sit with myself and say that guilt can’t control me, that my self-worth isn’t based on the length of my marriage,” she said. “I can change the cycle.”

Her first husband, as far as she knows, is still drinking and has not tried to help himself despite requests from family and friends. But in situations of alcoholism, she says, it’s like they say on the airplane: put your oxygen mask on first. “You have to take care of yourself because you can only control yourself,” she said. “If there’s someone in your life who’s an alcoholic, you’re not going to be able to control their behavior. You can’t tie your emotions to that person getting better. If they’re not willing, you can’t feel bad about yourself.” She advises finding biggest supports and starting there.

No matter how bad of a space you’re in, she says, you can come out happier; you’re stronger than you think you are. “Imagine a graph of y=x,” she said, making a diagonal line with her arm. “You’re improving, but a lot of people think it’s a straight line. What it really is, is you go a little upward, and you slip back. And you go a little upward, and you slip back. So you’re going to slip back, but the point is you don’t slip back as far as you were originally. You’re making progress, and you’re just going to have times where you think you’re having a setback, but it won’t be as far back as you originally were.”

Congress is in a much better place than she was five years ago. She practices mindfulness techniques, she appreciates being alone and she has regained a healthy sense of self and confidence. “That’s my biggest takeaway: how strong I am to have dealt with all of this and to have come out happier and have more supportive people in my life and to be doing a better job teaching,” she said. “It’s all just positive.”

It was only through reaching out for help that Congress got to where she is today. It is hard to open up and to find that will, but showing your true feelings and weaknesses does make you stronger. “Look at how far I’ve come,” she said. “My assumption that I couldn’t talk to anyone was false. Look at the people in your life and be brave. It’s going to be a lot better if you find someone than if you don’t.”