On October 1, 2025, the government shut off the lights for 43 days in the longest government shutdown in American history. Although necessary programs including emergency rooms, air traffic control, law enforcement, and border security were left operational, those programs began to be compromised as the shutdown continued.


Food stamps, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) are necessary programs that had started to wane following the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s loss of funding from the shutdown. SNAP benefits—which provide assistance for low-income families to buy necessary groceries—were temporarily paused. Another food aid program, WIC, which supplies food for families with children up to five years old, was also on the verge of being cut entirely. According to CBS News, around 42 million Americans rely on SNAP, including 8.7 percent of New Jersey residents. That’s 826,575 people living in New Jersey whose livelihoods were threatened by this cut in funding.


In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, having adequate food is considered a fundamental right. As students at PHS, we are taught to be empathetic and improve the communities around us. We cannot be bystanders to the institutions meant to protect our most vulnerable while facing this challenging time in our nation. 


Although state governments are starting to reinstate benefits after the shutdown’s end, the situation highlights the increasing importance of community-based pantries in the face of government instability. SNAP relies on local grocery stores as the backbone of their program. They provide families with supplemental funds, and participating grocery stores—which are already equipped with sufficient stock, storage, refrigeration, staff, and trucks—handle the consumer side of the process.
When SNAP is cut, families are forced to turn to food banks. Unlike grocery stores, pantries are unable to rely on corporate establishments, and thus scaling up supply to meet rising demand is incredibly challenging. At Mercer County Arm in Arm, there has already been a 20 percent increase in demand for food services in the last year, and their burden only increased under the shutdown. Arm in Arm explained in their newsletter that the SNAP crisis prompted “[serving] 250 additional families weekly by extending pantry hours at two sites and bolstering our food resources which requires more funding and more volunteers. To do this for just one month will cost close to $50,000.” Food banks are running out of food, finding that they are understaffed to serve the influx of people coming in, and above all, running out of cash. 


By donating their time and effort, PHS students can help alleviate the hardships of Arm in Arm and other vital community resources. Many offer weekly volunteer opportunities, and the club PHS Food Aid hosts monthly drives at local farmer’s markets. From collecting money or packaged goods, to working on educating the people around you, there are an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to fighting food insecurity in Princeton. 

Photo courtesy of: Evan Raphael

Evan Raphael ‘26 leads a drive with PHS Food Aid for Arm in Arm.

SNAP cuts strain food pantries

These days, it seems that beauty industry consumers prioritize convenience over all else. They look for the product that creates the best results while having to put in the least effort, trading sustainability for ease of use. This mindset favors products with disposable, often unrecyclable packaging. In 2024, Business Waste found that 120 billion units of plastic packaging are thrown away each year. This includes packaging for shampoo and lotion, products that carry an additional environmental impact — water waste. The International Natural and Organic Cosmetics Association finds that such products can contain up to 95 percent water. 


With climate change and pollution threatening fresh water supplies, it is important to conserve this precious resource. A 2019 study from the Research Institute for Medicine corroborates that beauty products in the form of bars or sticks minimize water use in the consumption phase and thus benefit conservation. The idea of waterless beauty may sound strange at first, but their accessibility and sustainability make it a worthwhile swap for students’ daily routines. 


One of the most common waterless beauty products is shampoo bars, which are solid surfactant-based products that resemble bars of soap. The price point of one shampoo bar — often $15 — is a bit higher than that of bottled shampoo, but its formula is designed to be ultra-concentrated and last more washes. For example, Ethique Beauty advertises their shampoo bars as equal in use to three 350 mL plastic shampoo bottles, while their conditioner bars are equal to five 350 mL bottles of conditioner. Additionally, most shampoo bars are packaged in recyclable or compostable paper packaging, which saves water from manufacturing and reduces its end-of-life impacts on local ecosystems.


Ditching familiar liquid products can be daunting, but many mainstream stores make waterless beauty swaps easily accessible. Lush, the original inventor of the shampoo bar in 1987, sells a plethora of water-free products at most malls. Sephora now carries shampoo bars from Viori and superzero, while Amazon offers items from Ethique Beauty as well as a variety of other eco-friendly brands. Instructions for use are simple, and often involves rubbing the bar directly onto wet hair and then massaging to lather. 


Although it can be hard to make changes to our usual personal care products, every little bit counts to conserve water and reduce packaging waste. By incorporating a small aspect of sustainability into daily routine from a young age, individuals can save thousands of bottles of product over a lifetime. 

Ditch the water in your shampoo

The start of the new school year has brought many 
changes to Princeton High School: new teachers, new 
schedules, new facilities, and — most noticeably — new 
school-issued MacBooks. On paper, the laptops are a 
clear upgrade: faster, sleeker, and 
more powerful. But beneath that 
polish, many students have run 
into something less exciting: a 
wall of restrictions.

Last year’s devices allowed 
students a degree of flexibility 
across multiple apps. Students 
once had access to Adobe Creative Cloud — tools like 
Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and InDesign — 
which were heavily used by visual arts elective classes, as 
well as various clubs like Yearbook. 

When access to key academic or creative tools is blocked, 
not every student has a clear or immediate path forward 
— especially those who may not know how to navigate the 
tech support process. That gap points to a deeper equity 
issue of technological fluency — an issue that our tech 
department should work to solve, potentially by hosting 
assemblies to instruct students. Still, Dean Diana Lygas 
believes that the district is moving in the right direction. 

“There is certainly a balance that comes into play. 
[Unfortunately], that sometimes means blocking access to 
certain content that might be non-educational, disruptive, 
or inappropriate,” said Lygas. “But I love that our students 
have the benefit of receiving a school-issued computer as 
nice as a MacBook. It offers so much power and creativity 
in what students can use it for.”

However, students such as Adam Kaplan ’27 argue 
that the benefits of the investment by the school are 
significantly cut short through device restrictions.

“If you’re giving us computers this good, we should 
be doing something with them, considering [the 
district] just spent hundreds of dollars per student 
getting us these crazy computers,” said Kaplan. 

The abruptness of the technology changes have 
wreaked havoc on the workflow of not just students but also 
teachers as they have lost access to classroom technology. 
Printers, document cameras, and DVD players — each 
pieces of technology that had previously been integral parts 
of the way some teachers have conducted classes — have 
disappeared without explanation or forewarning. 
 
“Our old dock cameras [and] DVD players are gone 
... they’ve just ceased to exist ... they [are] no longer here 
in any of the rooms. [The] new technology sounds great. 
However, it doesn’t allow us to teach the same materials 
that we used to,” said English teacher Anna Soriano.

Restrictions on technology, while well-intentioned, are 
detrimental largely for the same reasons that helicopter 
parenting creates ineffective adults — people need to 
learn from failure. We implore administration to keep 
our school’s motto at the top of their mind: learn to live. 
It means — in today’s day and age — learning to live not 
just with technology but also using it appropriately as a 
tool. This requires being exposed to the technology of 
tomorrow in an environment where students can learn to 
use it effectively and to their benefit, while continuing to 
maintain an environment of genuine learning. And this 
is difficult to accomplish through the sudden removal 
of integral websites, apps, and classroom tools. PPS 
administration should strive to be transparent with teachers 
and students — the people who are most affected by such 
changes — and take their feedback when making changes.

Photo: Charley Hu

A restricted message from Mosyle appears when 
students attempt to access certain websites.

Technology restrictions hinder learning

As days get longer and brighter, our thoughts turn to summer time: ice cream after sunsets, afternoons lounging at the pool, and of course, days spent walking across the beach, playing in the sand, and tumbling through the waves of the ocean. 


It’s natural to want something material to remember our vibrant moments near the water. However, while seashells and sand seem like harmless and thoughtful mementos from the places we visit, there is a significant environmental impact to consider when we take parts of nature away from where they belong. A phrase popularized by the U.S. National Park Service in the 1950s is still relevant to today’s best practices: “take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.”


In a 2014 article, Jason Goldman, a writer for the Washington Post, pointed out that a decrease in the abundance of seashells harms the local shoreline ecosystem. As shells provide anchors for various aquatic plants and serve as shelters for hermit crabs, taking them from beaches leaves wildlife without resources they need to survive. The seemingly small act of collecting shells on the beach leads to a domino effect of adverse impacts on native coastal populations.


Besides taking photos, there are many objects students can collect on their travels that have the same or more sentimental value than seashells, such as traditional crafts. Taking a trip to Honolulu? Check out stores that sell traditional patterned quilts that carry the story of the island’s long history. If you’re going to Greece, a good option is Komboloi, or in English, “worry beads,” an art that dates back long before the 20th century. By our very own Jersey Shore, you can create both a unique souvenir and lasting memories at Hot Sand, a public glassblowing studio in Asbury Park. 


These souvenirs are much more personal than seashells, as they serve to not only educate us on vibrant cultures from the places we visit, but also support businesses keeping thousand-year-old art forms alive. It’s a win-win. Instead of taking away important pieces of marine ecosystems just to have a memento, let’s strive to take souvenirs that both enrich us and the beaches of the local people.

The price of our memories

The lunch bell rings at 11:33, and fourth period ends as hundreds of students pour out of classrooms and into the halls of Princeton High School. Some students head to the library, while others head to the guidance office. Some just walk laps — earbuds in, heads down, skipping lunch for the third, maybe fourth day in a row. It is not a diet. It is not a protest. It is not always a choice. 


For too many students, lunch has become optional. Not because they are not hungry — they are — but because 35 minutes is not enough time to eat, finish an essay, ask a teacher a question, and review for the quiz they have next period. In the past few years, there has been an unhealthy exaggeration of high school performance and how it affects the futures of these students. Because of this, when given the choice between nourishing the body and “getting ahead” in their studies, the choice seems trivial.


This is not just a PHS problem. According to a 2020 national survey by Yale University, 75 percent of high school students report having negative feelings toward school. The general sentiment seems to be that these students feel negatively towards school because of apathy or laziness. The truth, though, is that these students are under copious amounts of stress, driving them to have these negative feelings.


A New York Times article written by Tim Donahue stated that “we [as a society] have pushed high school students into maximizing every part of their days and nights.” Students feel like they need to do more and more in order to stay afloat. Self-care takes a backseat because students feel like they need to do so much in order to distinguish themselves. They need to get perfect grades, take the hardest classes, be a part of every extracurricular under the sun. Of course, under all of this pressure, physical needs become an afterthought.


The way students cope with this stress is not always visible — but it is often unhealthy. Skipping meals, sleeping in fragments, and studying at midnight. It becomes a game of sacrifice: what can be dropped to make room for everything else? For too many, the answer is lunch. A study from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that students given less than 20 minutes to eat consumed significantly less food and nutrients. When the body is not given the nutrients it needs to function properly, productivity drops. This, in turn, harms students’ academic performance.
When students are skipping meals just to keep up — when they feel they have to choose between eating and succeeding — something is wrong with the system, not the student.


We need to stop pretending that this is normal.


Lunch should not be a luxury. It should not be treated as expendable. It is time — real, uninterrupted time — to eat, decompress, exist as something other than a GPA.


So the questions posed are, how do we take back our lunch periods? How do we take our lives back from the grind that academia has instilled in us? There is no single fix, but there are places to start — both as individuals and as a school.


At a school-wide level, the goal should not just be more time. It should be better use of the time we already have. Lunch needs to be protected. No required meetings, no mandatory makeups, unless a student chooses them. The school can also help by making lunch more accessible — a pre-order system or even a simple form could cut down the lines that push students away. And if we are serious about student wellness, the message needs to be loud and clear: eating and resting are not optional, they are essential. Teachers and administrators should say that out loud. Not just in emails during Mental Health Week, but every day, in how they schedule, how they speak, and what they prioritize.


But change cannot just come from the top. It starts with what we do, too. That might mean bringing food from home instead of skipping lunch. Taking ten minutes to sit down and actually eat. Using free periods to slow down instead of squeezing in more. Outside of school, it means setting boundaries — around sleep, around work, around the pressure to always do more. And maybe most of all, it means shifting how we think. Getting the perfect grades and getting into a top college are not the most important things in your life. More than that, needing rest does not mean you are failing. Taking care of yourself is not weakness — it is proof that you are still trying to live, even in a system that tells you to do the opposite.


So when the lunch bell rings at 11:33, you do not need to run. You can stop. You can eat. You can let that be enough.

Photo: Julia Li


Ksenia Petukh ’27 eats lunch and studies in the IDEAS Center.

Asha Nag's Work