During a seven hour school day, sometimes all I need to do is use the bathroom, but to do that, I have to participate in a confusing and unnecessary system. Wilde Lake introduced a new bathroom system during the first week of May. Each bathroom is open for certain periods of the day and closed for the rest. The bathroom doors have been labeled with signs indicating what periods a bathroom is open....

What happens at the Board of Education (BOE) does not stay at the Board of Education. The decisions made at the Howard County BOE meetings directly impact you and me, especially when they have to do with the budget for our schools. My mom is a Howard County teacher, and I am involved with student government in Howard County as the head of Public Relations for HCASC. Hearing about these budget cuts...

The first thing I do after a long day at school is lay in bed, pull out my phone, and open an app. My habits started out responsibly, but soon forms of media like YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels led to an addiction. It was so easy to skip the videos I did not want to see and keep getting the ones I wanted. This led to endless scrolling, with my eyes plastered to my phone. Picking up my phone when...

I believe in second chances. The Peace Room was started by the Wilde Lake Restorative Justice Committee in 2021 and run by former teacher Ms.Wright. The original vision of the Peace Room was to help students with mental health issues as they transitioned back into normal school after the hardship of COVID-19. After a year of running the Peace Room, Ms. Wright stepped down during the 2022-23 school...

Three years ago, Wilde Lake senior Armand Lucas and his friends were racially profiled at the Columbia Mall. Armand’s profiling experience is hard to hear, but not unusual. A store manager told one of Armand’s friends that he “wasn’t on the block,” a reference to drug dealing. The boy was simply standing in the food court, and being Black. Yet, an adult identified him as a criminal because...