Vermont’s educational future
Julia Scott, Assistant Editor
June 13, 2018
On April 1, Vermont Secretary of Education Rebecca Holcombe stepped down after announcing her resignation in the weeks prior. For many, this brought up concerns over the future of the Vermont State Legislature’s Act 46, a 2015 bill restructuring Vermont’s schools to a more “cohesive governance...
NM-See what we can do
Eros Bouley-Swedo and Drew Pettengill
June 13, 2018
Deciding to attend college involves many big challenges for a graduating senior. Deciding to spend years of your life and thousands of dollars to further your education is a big choice. A huge deciding factor is the money part as it can put someone in debt for years and years. 71% of all American ...
CANVAS dies in “Infinity War”
Haley Seymour, Co-Editor
June 13, 2018
Filed under News, Showcase, Uncategorized
In 2016, BFA introduced Canvas, a learning management system for proficiency based grading. Canvas was supposed to align with PowerSchool in order to provide an official gradebook for report cards and official transcripts, as well as a place to store Personal Learning Plans, eportfolios, and manage ...
The takeover of promposals
Owen Pelkey, Writer
May 21, 2018
Filed under Features, News, Showcase
With prom season passing, the BFA community was not immune to the popular trend of “promposals” that have continued to rise since the beginning of the century. A promposal is a high school student’s way of elaborately asking another student to the prom, almost imitating a marriage proposal, hen...
Maple Run: what have they done?
Haley Seymour, Assistant Editor
May 21, 2018
Running a school board is like cooking a large meal; however, preparing for four separate schools with four different chefs was spoiling the food. Before 2017, it seemed there were too many cooks in the Franklin Northeast Supervisory kitchen with each of the five school boards, so the school system ha...
High school vs the real world
Grace Bates, Writer
May 21, 2018
High school is supposed to prepare students for college, but are high schools succeeding in preparing them? According to Hechingerreport.org, “students are getting out of high school without the skills they need to succeed in college.” With students not getting the proper skills they need i...
Hungry Americans
Eros Bouley-Swedo, Writer
May 18, 2018
Hunger in America is a very serious problem that many families face every day. This can be due to a variety of reasons including lack of income or societal status. In some places in the world they don’t even have grocery stores with legitimate produce and healthy items because they would just get rob...
School is a-ten-d out of ten
Drew Pettengill, Writer
May 18, 2018
Ferris Bueller might have made skipping seem cool but the law would have to disagree. Ever since students have been attending school it has been required by law to attend. But no law is without specifications, if a student is called out of school the law is not broken. An article on the website “F...
BFA safety poll
Haley Seymour, Editor-In-Training
April 19, 2018
In order to gain perspective from the student body, the BFA Mercury created and sent out a poll regarding school safety, gun violence, and gun control. The poll was created by two BFA Mercury members: Grace Bates and Eros Bouley-Swedo. The pair created a series of questions in Google Forms fo...
Everything wrong with “Walk Up, Not Out”
Haley Seymour, Editor-In-Training
April 19, 2018
Filed under News, Opinion, Showcase
As an argument against the Student Walk Out, which occurred on March 14 across the country, many people have been posting on social media that students should “Walk Up, Not Out.” The Student Walk Out took place to honor the lives of those who were tragically killed in Parkland, Florida, as well...
BFA safety committee upgrades
Alek Wolfe, Assistant Editor
April 19, 2018
Everyday in school, students and staff are carrying on a normal day learning and teaching. One would think that a public place, such as a school, is a safe environment. However, this isn’t the case in recent years. For the past few years, news reports about school shootings have been headlining pa...
Vermont marches for change
April 19, 2018
On March 24, a mass of students, teachers and parents visited the capitol building in Montpelier in a national protest for March For Our Lives. The protest, introduced to society after the events of the recent Parkland and former school shootings such as Sandy Hook, advertises school safety to state...