Parent Newsletter #35: 5/2/25

Website: https://phs.piedmont.k12.ca.us/
Location: 800 Magnolia Ave, Piedmont, CA 94611
Phone: (510) 594-2626 | Instagram: @piedmonthigh

Parent Newsletter: Archives

2024-25 School Profile | Bell Schedule (Regular)

Road to Graduation | Yearbook Info

College & Career Newsletter | Athletic Newsletter

Principal: Dr. Yoshihara

Assistant Principal: Mr. Marik

Dear Highlander Families,

May is here and just 23 days until graduation and the end of the school year for students. I know these weeks will seem to fly by. I encourage our students to stay focused and to do their best on AP Exams and finals.

We also has many year-end celebrations coming up that you are invited to. May 5th also kicks off Teacher Appreciation Week. Our Parent Club has specific events each day for our teachers. We thank them in advance for doing this. Have a great weekend.

Best,

Dr. Yoshihara

May 5-9: Teacher Appreciation Week

May 5: Start of AP Testing

May 6: National Teacher Appreciation Day

May 11: Mother's Day

May 14: Board Meeting (7 pm, cell phone policy to be on the agenda)

May 15: Guitar Exhibition (5-7 pm, engineering lab)

May 16: Highlander Athletic Awards (7 pm, AHT)

May 17-18: Makers Fair

May 19: PHS School Site Council (3:40 pm, Rm 117)

May 19: Senior Awards Night (7-8:30 pm, AHT)

May 20, 22: PHS Instrumental Concert (7-9 pm, AHT)

May 23: PHS/MHS Day on the Green (1:30-3:30, baseball field)

May 26: Memorial Day

Wednesday and Friday will be Academic Support for all. Remember to tag a teacher!

Link to FlexiSched: https://piedmont.flexisched.net/

The library will be closed the week of 5/5 and 5/12 during AP testing. The student printer will be available outside the library for student printing needs during those two weeks.

Tech Support Services will be available during its regular lunch time hours on Mon-Wed-Fri in front of the library doors. For additional tech services, email help@piedmont.k12.ca.us or go to the Tech Office at Piedmont Middle School on the side door at the bottom of the ramp.

Students - Please have your community service hours into Track It Forward by May 10th to be considered for honor roll. For this school year, your hours can be from May 11, 2024- May 10th , 2025.

Parents of Rising Seniors,

Please check your email for a message about the UC ELC program and authorization form that was sent to all parents of Rising Seniors on April 18th. Parent authorization is required in order for your child to be considered for the program. If you haven't already, the deadline to respond is Friday, May 9th.

The UC Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) program ensures that top-performing California students - drawn from the top 9% of each participating school - have the opportunity to attend a UC campus. ELC requires participating schools to submit student contact data and record information for the top 15% of rising seniors after final junior year grades are confirmed. We cannot release this information to UC without your permission.

For more information about the UC ELC program go to: UC ELC Program Information.

We had our annual Spring Dance Show back on April 24. If you did not get to see this event, you may watch the video here. It was a nice show allowing our students to showcase their hard work this year. They were amazing!

We have some important updates for Dual Enrollment.

Course to be offered: Math 3C: Calculus III (course code 43555)

Offered by: Peralta Community College District, Berkeley City College

To be taught on the PHS Campus (Room TBD)

Number of Weeks: 17.5

Day & Times: W/F: 1:20-3:35 pm

Peralta Units: 5 units

First day of course: August 20

Last day of course: December 12

FInal Exams: December 7-13

Peralta Calendar

Note: Class on 11/26 will be via Zoom

Last day to Add/Drop: 8/29/25

Last day to withdraw w/ a "W": 9/12/25

Final grades due by: 12/20/25

Instructor's Policy (subject to change):

Exams: Weeks 4, 8, 12, and 16

Finals during finals week

Professor will drop lowest test score (not the final)

Have 1 week to do homework

Missing or late work policy: Usually no makeups as lowest exam scored is dropped

Final grade: 20% HW, 10% Quizzes (4-6 quizzes) & group work (at least one activity/week), 45% tests, 25% final exam

Materials:

Basic scientific calculator

Students will be using Mathematica for analysis (free to college students)

Textbook will be OpenStax, Volume III

Please see your counselor if you would like more information about this offering. We do also plan to offer dual enrollment in the Spring of 2026. More information will be provided once we have definitive information.

As we continue to finalize the schedules for both students and staff for next year, we have an update for our Highlander families. We have identified a teacher for AP Seminar for next year: Mr. Jamie Mockel. Mr. Mockel's collegiate work is around research (anthropology) so it is right up his alley. Furthermore, he is most excited to take this knowledge and apply it to this course for next year's Highlanders.

We also have a number of other teachers who will get trained with Mr. Mockel this summer (Ms. Black and Ms. Newell). This will be indicator of future instructors for this course as well as for AP Research (for consideration in 2026-27). If you are still interested in signing up for this course, open to current 9th-11th graders, please reach out to your counselor.

We have some students who have scored among the highest in the nation in the 2024 PSAT. From more than 1.3 million test takers, each of these students is among the 50,000 highest-scoring and will be recognized in the fall.

From the 50,000 high scorers, about 16,000 will be named National Merit Semifinalists and the others will be commended. The former group will move on to compete for the roughly 7,000 Merit Scholarship awards to be given out in 2026. Good luck to all of our students.

1. Milo Bakshi
2. Alex Chin
3. Cassie Colby
4. Audrey Dickinson
5. Julian Gard
6. Samantha Huynh
7. Kate Jumper
8. Niko Kalamas
9. Miles Kim
10. Athena Lim
11. Maddox Ma
12. Darcy McKee
13. Nate McKenzie
14. Petro Papahadjopoulos
15. Aidan Patty
16. Luck Peterson
17. Olive Reining
18. Noah Sohn
19. Kalyani Spieckerman
20. Naomi Treichler
21. Nathan Tuan
22. Nate Welch
23. Jerry Jialin Yu

We had a student come up with an Idea Drop Box. From the student:

Idea drop will be available starting this coming Monday April 28 . You can drop your ideas and any school related suggestions you might have on the Idea drop box outside the library.

The box will be there to collect ideas for the next two weeks, till May 9! We look forward to read and implement whenever possible all your suggestions and ideas to make our school a better and inclusive place for everyone!

Hello Students:

This is another reminder to get your hours logged into Track it Forward before the May 10th deadline. It is easier to input these requests if you do this now vs wait until closer to the date instead of the last minute rush. You will help us to manage the request for new organizations if you log in these hours now. Thank you.

Important reminder: As we get close to the end of the year, we’d like to remind Sophomores, Juniors and Seniors there are two requirements to qualify as a PHS Honor Society Member*:

1. Minimum Semester GPA (total and weighted) of 3.60.

2. Community Service Hours. The hours must be earned and logged in Track It Forward by May 10 of each school year in order to receive credit.

*not available to Freshmen

For more information on Honor Society please see: https://phs.piedmont.k12.ca.us/counseling/honor-society

For more information on Community Service Hours (including a detailed FAQ on what qualifies) please reference: https://phs.piedmont.k12.ca.us/college-center/community-service-tracking

Thank you,

Ms M-L

The Bird Calling Contest video is now available. For those that want to relive the joy, feel free to check out the links below. It is in two parts and it may ask you to download the video, due to file size. Enjoy.

Bird Calling Contest Video Part 1

Bird Calling Contest Video Part 2

Dual enrollment is coming to PHS. We want to express appreciation to our teachers for working with us in ensuring students have access to high level curriculum beyond what we currently offer, while maintaining a robust program for all. We also want to thank our Board for the vision to allow our Highlanders to excel academically.

We plan to offer Math 3C in the fall on the PHS campus. This five unit advanced math course will cover partial differentiation: Jacobians, transformations, multiple integral, theorems of Green and Stokes, differential forms, vectors and vector functions, geometric coordinates and vector calculus. Students will need to have successfully completed Calculus BC to enroll in this course.

The course is scheduled to be offered Wednesdays and Fridays from 1:20-3:35 pm. and will follow the college calendar. PHS Counselors will be reaching out to all students who expressed interest in a dual enrollment course and meet the prerequisite to verify enrollment and go over the next steps to begin enrollment in the class for the fall semester.

We are excited about this new opportunity for our students. Questions may be directed to the Principal.

This week's student is Shayna Chau. Thank you for getting your responses to me so quickly. We start off by having Ms. Xia share some thoughts on Amelia.

1. What quality(ies) best describes this student? Shayna is a positive, optimistic, hardworking, ambitious, and kind student.
2. How long have you known the student? I have known Shayna for two years.
3. What is the most memorable event you have of this student? She always does her best to seize every opportunity to demonstrate leadership. In particular, during singing competitions, she consistently helps her classmates rehearse, prepare props, and organize band practices—always with a high level of professionalism and dedication.
4. How does this student Achieve the Honorable? Every year, she volunteers and performs in the community’s Lunar New Year celebrations, joining local residents in festive activities. Shayna actively participates in class discussions, is always willing to support both teachers and classmates, and returns to PMS each year to host workshops and help promote Diversity Day.
5. If there was one word to describe this student, what would it be? Kind

And from Shayna herself:

1. So far this year, what has been your most memorable experience? My most memorable/favorite experiences this year have been the time I've spent pole vaulting. I've made a lot of new friends and memories through it, despite challenges like injuries, mental blocks, and commuting to Walnut Creek in rush hour practice. One of the most memorable instances was when after taking team photos, my teammate Meg and I left a bit later than usual, and got stuck in terrible traffic. After over an hour in the car, we pulled into the parking lot, only to pass one of the other vaulters leaving, as practice was already over. We spent a few minutes chilling in the car and eating snacks, when Meg got the notification alerting her that she had been accepted into her dream college, Kenyon. I'd say that was a pretty productive practice.
2. If you were to describe PHS to someone who is thinking about coming, what would you say to them? If I were to describe PHS to someone thinking about coming, I'd say that the environment is very competitive, but there are also a lot of amazing teachers and interesting programs/activities that make this school unique.
3. If you were in charge at PHS, what is one action you might take to make it better? If I were in charge of PHS, I would encourage teachers to communicate and collaborate more. I've noticed a trend where there will be some weeks with relatively little homework and tests, and I'll be going to bed by nine every night, not stressed, and then a few weeks later I'll have four tests, multiple big projects, and a huge increase in homework. In such weeks, my peers and I have to stay up past midnight studying, feel overwhelmed and are significantly more stressed. During such weeks, quality of schoolwork decreases due to students having to balance so many different assignments, mental health drops due to increased stress and feeling overwhelmed, not to mention this disproportionately harms students who work part time jobs, have to take care of siblings, or who participate in sports and other extracurriculars. This leads to missing assignments building up, low test scores, and even pushes many students to cheat or cut class because they simply don't have time to study. If teachers collectively agree to be more flexible and communicate when they assign tests or big projects, and work together to balance coursework between weeks, then we will see a boost in academic performance and a decrease in stress. PMS has a spreadsheet which limits the amount of tests per week total between all classes. While this exact program wouldn't work for PHS, something similar to make teachers collaborate and be more flexible would make a huge difference.
4. If you could share one sentence with your parents/guardians, what would you say? Thank you for always being supportive and helping me make good decisions.
   
5. What is your favorite word? I don't know about a favorite word, but my favorite number is 7, because it's a nice shape, and I like adding the little slash through it.
   
6. What is your favorite song? My favorite songs are Dirty Laundry by Don Henley, Where'd All the Time Go? By Dr Dog, and I also love anything by the Strokes
7. What is your favorite food? I love Oysters
8. Can you share a photo of something from your summer and why it is special to you? Attached is a photo of me and my parents at Rapa Nui, over Winter Break.

• A big shout out to our parent club for cleaning out our emergency supply room today. They organized it, took inventory, refreshed and replaced many items. Thank you Nairobi, Amy Jo, Buffy, and Holly. We couldn't do this without you!
• Kudos to the many parents who helped at Prom last week. While the weather was a bit dreary, inside the venue, it was amazing. We've received many positive comments about the event.

This is repeated as the trivia had some technical difficulties at the outset, so I will run the same quiz for one more week. Thank you.

Thanks to all those that participated in the Highlander Trivia question in the last newsletter. We had excellent participation this time.

The question for last week was: For those who begin to know me, they have learned that I've seen a few musicals. This is a father-daughter "thing" as she has enjoyed musicals ever since her first one (The King & I). Since then, how many musicals have we seen together. [non scientific, and based on my best estimate]. Updated.

So the first musical I saw with my younger daughter was The King & I back on June 13, 2015 at the Glendale Center Theater. She was 8 years old then. Since then, we have see 124 musicals together. Number 125 will be this weekend where we will watch Six (for the fourth time).

Congratulations to Audrey L. who got the closest with her answer of 50. Please come to the main office at your convenience to claim your prize!