After 32 years, Palo Alto High School’s Together Everyone Achieves More program will undergo significant changes next school year due to high costs, staffing issues and declining enrollment.
TEAM was designed for freshmen to ease the transition into high school. Students in the program did more project-based learning and all TEAM students had the same biology, English and history teachers.
According to TEAM English teacher Karin Kolb, the program emphasizes group work rather than working individually.
“TEAM is academic, but it also incorporates a lot of the acronym TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More,” Kolb said. “This idea [is] that people — instead of working independently — can work together to have a richer experience.”
TEAM biology teacher Elizabeth Brimhall said that TEAM teachers are potentially going to start a new program called STEAM.
“TEAM teachers are looking at starting a thing that we’re calling STEAM,” Brimhall said. “STEAM will focus on science, tech, engineering, art, humanities and math and sort of those disciplines.”
The TEAM program is known for its annual group field trips to Yosemite, where all students in the program go camping for a week where students have group hiking, volunteering and other activities.
According to Brimhall, TEAM’s annual Yosemite trip became very expensive after COVID.
“Things got very expensive,” Brimhall said. “For example, our bus costs to go to Yosemite went from $2,000 pre-pandemic to $10,000 post-pandemic.”
Kolb said TEAM trips give students opportunities to interact with one another.
“Yosemite … is an outdoor experience and educational at the same time,” Kolb said. “A lot of community bonding happens in this trip, but it also happens in other trips like when we go to Foothills or Monterey [Monterey Bay Aquarium] or, this year, we even walked to Gamble Gardens to read our poetry.”
According to Kolb, the annual Yosemite trip is costly and will not be continued starting next school year.
“Yosemite is a very big deal,” Kolb said. “It costs a lot of money. You have to book it [the trip] in advance, so the entire down payment needs to be paid before the end of this year. We did try to cut it back a bit in order to manage it more, but we always got pushback about kids missing math and ‘what is going to happen’.”
Kolb said TEAM will no longer be a non-profit organization in order to simplify how the program operates financially.
“We are dissolving our non-profit designation,” Kolb said. “Other groups like the Social Justice Pathway, band and theater — none of those groups have non-profits, so they are able to work with the money that they can bring in to do these fun things, just not as a non-profit.”
According to junior Kai Bunger-Tang, a former TEAM student, the program created some of his strongest high school memories.
“It [TEAM] was a really great experience,” Bunger-Tang said. “I made some of my closest friends from TEAM and all the field trips we went to, and I feel like the Yosemite trip was a highlight of all my high school experience and something I will not forget.”
Bunger-Tang said the smaller cohort and shared activities helped students form close connections.
“TEAM is great in terms of trying to get to know people better because you’re in a smaller cohort of around 80 people that share classes together and you go on all these field trips together,” Bunger-Tang said. “It really just creates this big sense of community.”
According to Bunger-Tang, TEAM gave incoming freshmen an easier way to build friendships at Paly.
“Especially for those freshmen that are coming in without knowing many people at Paly, it [TEAM] is really beneficial for them to build up a friend circle,” Bunger-Tang said. “But even as someone who came from Greene [Frank S. Greene Jr. Middle School], it was a really great experience for me because it forced me to get to know these people in the program and expand my friend circle a little bit.”
Freshman TEAM student Chloe Wu said shared classes helped students connect with one another.
“I was able to make a lot of friends, and I was able to collaborate with the same people in multiple classes,” Wu said. “TEAM is helpful for people coming from new schools to make friends.”
