Board of education settles on Princeton Middle School for new name of Walnut Lane school planetprinceton.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from planetprinceton.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
LOOSE ENDS 3/19: Middle school renaming ×
By Pam Hersh
I was supposed to write about COVID’s one-year anniversary, an event that received an overwhelming amount of attention all over the world. The media coverage yielded no wishes for many happy returns, only prayers for never, ever returning.
My brain refused to cooperate. It was numbed by words I never want to use again from the past year – “unprecedented,” “tragic,” “overwhelming,” “new normal,” “out of an abundance of caution,” “traumatized,” by “looking backward” and “anxiety ridden” about going forward. My psyche fought sinking further into the deep hole of depressing COVID-related topics or their very close angst-producing relatives, such as politics and race.
Albert Einstein Middle School. Elizabeth Stockton Middle School. Princeton Community School. Those are just a few of the names students and community members came up with as possible permanent names for the Princeton United Middle School, formerly known as the John Witherspoon Middle School.
More than 600 students at the middle school viewed video projects created by eighth-grade civics students who used the videos to made their cases for particular names. Students at the middle school then voted on their preferred names, selecting ten finalists.
Members of the Princeton community can now cast their votes for their favorite names. The school board is slated to select a name in June, and officials said the board’s decision will be informed by the student and community member votes. After the community weighs in, a follow-up vote for middle school students is scheduled for April, and a community discussion or forum is also in the works.