Archived News Item

Determined, Dared, and Done

So.

It is at this time, without too much ado (well, no more than necessary), that I am handing off the keys of this website to its next generation of minds.

I’m graduating, of course — graduated now, after a terrific last Friday — and heading for UC Santa Cruz in a scant few months to do battle with whatever college may bring. And having no ties to Berkeley High whatsoever, save for memories both bright and annoying, I can hardly keep running a Berkeley High website.

And so the reigns are being passed to my successors, who with any luck will not only do good things, but do new things, since it’s always worthwhile to get a completely new set of hands at the helm. Those hands will be Harris Lapiroff’s, whom some of you may recognize already from occasional news posts this year. He’s also been working behind the scenes a little, acclimating himself to the ways and means of BH.org, and a few days ago I finally slapped him with the real offer, and he accepted. (Jolly good thing, too; if he hadn’t, I don’t know who’d I’d have turned to.)

Harris will be a senior next year, one year behind me, so he’ll have only one year to conjure up his own dreams here, make them happen, and start yet another transition with the next batch. But then, maybe that’s a good thing. One of the real troubles I personally had in maintaining this site is that, after three years, it got a little tired. I got a little tired. I loved it, but you know teenagers — we like to flit, not set our feet down and gather moss.

In any case, I have no doubt whatsoever that Harris will handle things splendidly. Partly, this is because he’s an awful lot like me, in enough ways that it’s really pretty creepy. But it’s also because he’s not me, and his differences will be exactly what this place needs. You don’t want me; like certain teachers unnamed, all I’d do now is sit around cynically making wisecracks at things.

Obviously, I’ll be ensuring that Harris knows how to handle things, and giving him some pointers, explaining to him the general philosophies and guidelines I operated under for three years, but in the end, it’s entirely his ball. I won’t tell him how to run things and I don’t want to. If he keeps things almost exactly the same, or if he shakes them up 100%, I cannot predict. I will have a few lasting controls on the technical side, just in case he goes insane from drinking too much Pepsi and turns the site into a vampire porn forum, but short of that, y’all are on your own. Perhaps I’ll drop by now and then, and post a guest rant or two, sort of like a grandparent playing with a baby (lots of fun as long as you know you can hand it right back when it starts screaming). But maybe not.

I was planning to write a long and heartfelt (and mostly sincere) post about the past three years and the experience it’s been. Because, you know, it has been . . . quite a trip.

But now that I think about it, and start putting words on the screen, it just seems pointless. The legacy of this site has been every day, every post, every email, every time someone wanted to know something and actually came here to find out. From the first day I decided to concoct BerkeleyHigh.org up until this very moment, the goal has wholly been to serve the community — the vibrant, immense, largely insane, but endlessly charming bunch of students, parents, faculty, and general busybodies that make up Berkeley High School. I didn’t make it for personal gratification, or for the fun of it; I didn’t make it to practice web design, or to pad my college application. I didn’t make it to give me a platform from which to vent at teachers who gave me bad grades. (Actually, to varying degrees, all of these were true, but none were the reason I actually went and did it.)

I did it because it was something that needed doing. It was a void that wanted filling, and I thought we’d be better for it, and I hope I’ve done some part to accomplish that.

Ironically, or maybe just happily, a lot of the problem that I created this site to alleviate have faded in the past few years. The school now has an actual, working, useful website with real information on it (a lot of it the same stuff we’ve got here). The e-tree has frankly become a resource that you can use for 90% of your vital school-related news and announcements. Amusingly, the school bulletin has actually become less easy to find, since you’ve got to try to glean whatever you need from it aurally over a shitty PA system in a noisy classroom, but you can also find it elsewhere (the e-tree, this site, the PTSA site). And horror of horrors, the administration will actually feed us morsels of information from behind the velvet curtain on oh-so-rare occasions. And Slemp is still very tall and still invariably pleasant, though I confess that after god knows how long I still have no idea what most of his policies are.

We are accredited and we have a lovely new building that has never seen a whiff of fire, and our teachers didn’t go on strike, and we somehow survived a new SAT. And a few thousand people woke up yet again and realized that whatever they were so worried about had either happened or had not happened, and we were all still here, and the sun was still rising in the east, and the bathrooms were still dirty.

What of the future? Well, keep your eyes peeled on Slemp and the superintendent, because new policies that will either have you shaking your fist or hollering hallelujah are never far around the corner. And people keep leaving and new ones will surely appear. And rumor has it that the district is seriously considering opening up another site — the old location on University and Curtis, knocking down buildings and building a shiny new facility — for a number of uses, such as equipment storage and Independent Study. And if you’ve been hiding under a rock, all of BHS has basically shifted to a small school system, and that’s a transition that I admit I’m glad to have barely escaped. I’m sure it’ll provide drama aplenty for years to come.

Berkeley High never really changes. Whatever we learned there, that was first and foremost. Changes happen all the time but it never really changes, so whatever’s good for you, good, and whatever’s bugging you, deal with it. Because in a few years, you’ll be gone, and somehow, you’ll have survived, and none of it will seem nearly as dramatic, or as interesting, as it did at the time.

It’s just high school, after all. It’s a measly four years of your life. It’s totally meaningless. And it’s also a big goddamn deal.

Berkeley High’ll still be here in three months, but I won’t. So everyone who will be, I salute you. Good luck, relax, and enjoy yourself. Nobody escapes from high school a high schooler.

Thanks for listening.

— Brandon