Floods of information, piles of homework, noisy classes. With so many important things for Tualatin High School students to keep track of, it can be easy to let the important events, dates and assignments slip out of mind. Even with countless emails, apps and to-do lists to remind students of what needs to be done, no amount of reminders ever seems to be enough. This is why I believe that Tualatin students deserve more: daily intercom announcements and reminders. 

Flashback to my freshman year, fall 2019. I’m sitting in my second class of the day, furiously taking notes as TuHS alumnus and former Associated Student Body (ASB) president Teddy Fronczak reads through the day’s announcements. Club meetings, scholarship opportunities, college visits, birthdays, sporting events, school information, upcoming dances; Fronczak somehow managed to inform my naive freshman-self about everything that I would ever need to know for the week. 

Reminders like these came every day, usually during second or sixth period. Teachers would generously donate five minutes of class time, shushing their students, in order to ensure that each and every student could hear Fronczak’s voice over the intercom. As a new high school student, I found these announcements extraordinarily helpful. Not only would the announcements remind me every single day leading up to an event or deadline, but they would also notify me of new opportunities such as Bob Ross Night or Coffee House. 

To fully grasp why these announcements need to come back, I reached out to none other than Teddy Fronczak. 

“I think the school benefitted from the announcements because it was a convenient way to inform everyone at Tualatin High what was going on that day and about important deadlines,” Fronczak said. “Daily announcements are more timely and allow daily birthdays to be read and relevant information to be shared that day.” 

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and in-person classes stopped, so did the daily announcements. To fill in for the lack of school news, ASB patented The Weekly Wolf, an optional video students could watch to learn about school events. When in-person classes finally returned, it was immediately apparent to me that COVID-19 had killed the daily announcements. The Weekly Wolf remains. 

Though The Weekly Wolf is doing its best to provide this information, it can often lack the timeliness, relevancy and repetitiveness of the daily announcements because it comes on a weekly, not daily basis. Plus, some teachers opt to not even show The Weekly Wolf, meaning a lot of students do not hear announcements at all. Teachers can’t shut off the intercom, making announcements available to all. 

Despite this, The Weekly Wolf provides important information and fun entertainment, so it needs to stay. However, TuHS needs daily announcements, as well. I think it’s time for us to find a new Teddy Fronczak.