STA Administration Maintains “No-Acronym” Rule in Albanian Despite Senior Prefects’ Efforts

By Kubair Chuchra '18

     In an email to twenty-two Saint Albans' seniors  over Thanksgiving break, Mr. Bishop, the  faculty coordinator of the school's yearbook, The Albanian, informed, “I am writing this email to you all collectively as students whose pages have come to our attention during the review process. There are some changes that need to be made to your pages before they can be submitted.” These “changes” relate to the use of acronyms and initials on these students’ senior pages, two items which STA administrators have banned in recent years. This censorship policy dates back to a scandal surrounding the Albanian’s  2015 issue, which school administrators originally recalled, due to inappropriate content, and later redistributed, with all questionable content censored out

     The seniors who received the email had placed these phrases on their yearbook pages with support from two of their senior prefects, who, earlier that week, had submitted a document defining the phrases to administrators in hope of them making exceptions to their policy. In a Facebook post, the senior class’s Head Prefect Christian Potter ‘18 said he was submitting the document because, “if you’ve got a good, harmless acronym, it shouldn’t be cut.”
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     The student body's response to this yearbook situation has been overwhelmingly negative. One irritated senior, who has chosen to remain anonymous, exclaimed in an interview, “I just don’t see why we can’t have harmless acronyms like ‘FTB’ (‘for the boys’), ‘Roll T18e,’ and ‘R18S’ on our senior pages. It’s annoying and unnecessary for the administration to censor us like this and take the fun out of everything.” This sense of displeasure is representative of a larger negative sentiment which many seniors have developed towards the school over the past fall regarding certain administrative, BEEF Club, and athletics department issues.
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