In Leaders High School, there are two semesters. In the first semester a lot of ninth graders did not know how things worked around here, until moving on to the second semester there is a different feeling and maybe a different way that the system works. There have been students who seem to have noticed change or might have felt differently about the new semester. 

          Lately, the teachers have been getting stricter and more serious with their grading, especially the crew leaders doing such a good job helping out their students. For example, almost every week they have been doing academic check-ins to check how the crew is doing with their grades, attendance, and if they have missing work to complete, as well as making sure the students keep up with the work. 

          A lot of the students might think that with the PBATS it is a lot of work, like for the History and English PBATS. For History they had to do an Interview project, where they had to interview a person of their story and how they migrated here to America, and they had to write it down from that interview and make a story, after putting everything together they had to make a presentation for roundtables. 

          The students also had a PBAT they had to do for English class, they had to read their chosen book that they decided to analyze, they had to read and do weekly creative responses of what they read that week. After finishing the whole book they had to make an essay about the book, the assignment being called “Responding to Our Book: Author’s Invitation” and the final essay being “Why do we read” where they had to combine the paragraphs they have worked on before, one being “Initial Exploration: Why do we read?” on a paragraph being about a video about banned books and a paragraph about an image cartoon they had to base on the video and the image. On both of those they combined those two and combined that with the assignment “Responding to Our Book: Author’s Invitation” to make their Final Essay. 

           At first a lot of students thought that it seemed unfair because it was too much pressure and stress, but even after the whole work and finished the assignments, Spring Break was just around the corner and was a break from all the stress and pressure. 

            And even after the break, a week after students came back there would be intensives for a whole week which is a fun activity done at the school. It is very fun and exciting, which a lot of people seem to look forward to after all the stress of the assignment and PBATS. There are a  lot of different kinds of clubs and groups that the students could join into and could go into, they could learn to do things, and go on adventurous and lots of other things. 

           In the end, even with the stress of PBATs, there are a lot of students who do think that this semester is very much fair and a great way to end the year.