Third Silver Chips staff member published

Julia Kay, magnet senior and managing news editor of Silver Chips, wrote an opinion piece in the January 21 issue of Upfront, a biweekly news magazine for teenagers produced by the New York Times.

The piece was a pro-con debate on the issue of juvenile criminals should be tried as adults for serious crimes. Kay argued, "Yes: The criminal justice system should give teenagers who commit heinous crimes the same punishments it bestows upon older offenders."

The opposing view was provided by Rocio Nieves of Oakland California.

Julia Kay is the third Silver Chips staff member to be published in a professional newspaper this school year. In December, Samantha Henig wrote a full-length article for the Style Plus section of the Washington Post, and Joe Howley wrote a letter to the editor of the "Circuits" technology section of the New York Times.

Henig's article, "How the Other Half Matriculates," discussed the inequity caused by private schools and SAT tutoring. She spent her junior year in a New York City private school and returned to Blair this year, giving her a unique comparison of experiences.

She writes, "at the private school I attended, where tuition runs about $20,000 a year, it's not only common for students to spend thousands of dollars on SAT tutoring, it's expected."

She admits that the problem may be a vicous circle. Henig quotes a friend who said, "the admissions officers look at us, see that we're rich New York City kids, and they expect that we've been tutored."

"Tutoring from Inspiraca or Advantage Testing . . . could come to well over $10,000. That surpasses that annual income for than 9.5 million households in the United States," writes Henig. "Even with the cheaper alternatives out there, it's hard to deny the injustice that is brought to surface by the SAT these days."

Henig's mother, Robin Henig, had an article on the same page titled "Apply Yourself? It's Not Always Enough." She focused on the same topic as her daughter from a parent's point of view.

Samantha and Robin Henig's articles elicited three letters to the editor in Monday's Washington Post. All three disagreed with Henig's portrayal of private versus public schools. Cathy Stein, part-time college advisor at Blair, wrote one of the letters to defend the school's college preparation programs.

Joe Howley's letter on Dec 13 responded to a Circuits article from Dec 6, "Building Web Pages Without the Drudgery of HTML," that praised web design software over laborious raw code.

Howley wrote that the article "glorified a software genre that is almost antithetical to the Web itself." He argued that compatibility between browsers is the most important goal of a web designer and these "oh-so-sexy" applications make a site less likely to be viewed correctly in all browsers. "The only way to be sure," Howley writes, "is to roll up one's sleeves and work with the raw code."