Dear Mr. and Mrs. █████,
I am honored to welcome your ward, █████ █████, as the most recent member of our student body. We firmly believe that Sycamore High School will provide the right opportunity and environment for him to finish his time in secondary education. Rest assured that, as the school's principal, I will do everything possible to ensure your child's transition to the Virtual School System is as comfortable and seamless as possible.
I am proud to state that Sycamore High School maintains the leading edge in Cyber Reality Education, with a state-of-the-art virtual suite to ensure every student gets the most out of their education. Our faculties include a combined common area and auditorium, two wings of classrooms, each with the latest digital education technology, and the recently completed and unveiled Emmett Sterling Memorial Planetarium.
Your child is enrolled and scheduled to begin classes on August 31st, 2022—the start of the 2022-2023 school year—as part of Senior Class 12-B. Samson Franklin, who runs our 12th Grade Social Studies program, will be their homeroom teacher. His classroom is Room 308 of the school's West Wing. For further inquiries about your child's assigned classroom, contact him via his official school email address (sfranklin@sycamorehighschool.net).
Lastly, in addition to this email, I will include several attachments, including a map of the school for your child to familiarize themselves with, their schedule—complete with the necessary authorization code to access the Cyber Reality Server—detailed information about how to receive one of our school's distributed Cyber Reality Devices, a guide on how to operate the device properly, and our Student Code of Conduct.
Welcome to Sycamore High School.
Sincerely,
Floyd Griffith,
Principal
(fgriffith@sycamorehighschool.net)
Sycamore High School Map created by DerArknight.
Sycamore High School:Sycamore High School, just like many local secondary schools established after the CR revolution, is modeled after a physical space that does not exist. It is a slick and clean building with glass window facades floor-to-ceiling, three stories high surrounding a courtyard and greenhouses on three sides in the shape of a square letter "U." The surrounding area in suburbia San Jose where this school would, in the real world, exist, is simulated with sufficient detail to not be uncanny save for the most exacting appraisals, with an impassable barrier in all directions preventing students from going past the curb where the school's real estate ends.
Suspended bridges on each level connect the opposite wings of the school. The two parallel edges of the school play host to classrooms and various rooms stocked for anything an interest club might need—any requisitions for club equipment to be programmed come slowly but are always of reliable quality. The third edge of the school connecting the two-winged building plays host to a cafeteria on the first and second floors that, when necessary, transforms into the school's assembly hall. The third floor features a planetarium servicing a popular magnet program for astronomers that hosts guest lectures from members of the Experimental and Observational Astrophysics and Cosmology research program at Stanford University.
Class 12-B Homeroom:
The class homeroom, Room 308, lies at the southeastern corner of the third floor of the west wing, overlooking the schoolyard on the eastern side. Mr. Franklin has decorated the walls of the room with plenty of maps and historical infographics, given that he is a social studies teacher when not responsible for the homeroom of Senior Class 12-B, with his most cherished possession being a signed copy of Maya Angelou's The Heart of a Woman that he received in his youthful activism days, prominently displayed on his desk overflowing with essays to grade and the college-level literature he likes to recommend to interested students. The desks in the classroom, always arranged in neat rows, face the whiteboard and projector screen, where Mr. Franklin sometimes calls impromptu debates to give context to whatever subject comes up in his lectures.
The East Wing:
The science labs are on the first floor of the East Wing, rooms that dwarf regular classrooms and feature the typical setup for any traditionalist American high school laboratory, down to the safety chemical shower in each. The second and third floors primarily house the 9th and 10th-grade homerooms. The halls mostly feature the STEM subjects of the school, with classes that cater to those subjects typically located there, so as a natural byproduct, the East Wing's hallways tend to be blander, quieter, and less frequently trafficked by students than most of the rest of the school.
The West Wing:
The first floor of the West Wing features large rooms, all able to be reprogrammed with administrative permission to suit the needs of the school's most active clubs, which tend to compete for the artificially-limited space and resources. This year the clubrooms include the school's Christian Club, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, the school's Robotics Team—rumored to be on their way to national-level competition—and the Anime Club. The Anime Club, in particular, routinely runs into trouble when audited by teachers for the risqué content of the posters they like to download onto the walls. Opposite them, the Art Club is known for being underfunded and badly mismanaged to the point of often being the butt of jokes, despite the school trying to better its image.
The second floor features all the classrooms used as homerooms by the 11th grade, and the third floor those used by the 12th grade. The distribution of classes in the West Wing favors those of the Social Studies and Languages teachers. The wing's halls are decorated with the art projects and original works of students, such as poetry and short stories, displayed for easy reading on holographic tablets built into the walls at intervals between the lockers.
The Common Area:
The majority of the time, this two-story, wide-open space serves as the school cafeteria. The food line is on the first floor, with food served by buffet-style warming stations operated by the school's cafeteria crew. There are enough oval-shaped bench tables to seat the whole school over the remainder of the two floors, along with a few vending machines on the second floor serving branded products. The stairs in the cafeteria go in both directions, up and down, for easy movement between floors.
Controlled via the inaccessible admin areas of the school, the two rooms of the cafeteria can convert into an assembly hall with seating for hundreds, the floor slowly expanding upwards to make a series of bleacher-like seatings spread in a semi-circle around a viewing area complete with a large projector screen in the far wall, the warming stations for the food and tables for the students vanishing to accommodate. The lighting becomes moodier and more atmospheric than the bright and sterile cafeteria lights, and the windows facing outwards get covered by retractable dark foam walls that provide decent acoustics.
The Emmett Sterling Memorial Planetarium:
Above on the third floor is the Emmett Sterling Memorial Planetarium, a relatively recent addition to the facility. The name of the installation honors the memory of a devoted staff member who served as Sycamore High School's Physics teacher since the school's very inception, who passed away in late 2020 following a lengthy battle with cancer.
The idea of a planetarium was a popular subject of debate for many years; while heavily supported by students and staff alike, for a long time, it was considered an unnecessary expenditure by the local school district, which refused to fund it. It was not until 2018 that the administration secured the necessary funding; the addition itself was not complete until 2019.
The room is a massive circle; the walls are perfectly ring-shaped, the roof forms a colossal dome, and there are no corners due to the rounded nature of the installation. Four curved double doors, all aligned, provide easy access to and egress from the room. There are zero windows located anywhere within the structure's inner confines; it is impossible to see the inside of the planetarium from the outside or vice versa.
The lowered central area of the room is prominently visible from all other parts of the room; it houses the nucleus of the facility, a projector based on the latest real-world technology. Around this central well orbit rows and rows of seats in an almost-perfect loop around the room, broken only in the areas aligned with the northern exit of the room; in the center of this gap resides a desk, which houses the planetarium's controls.
The Schoolyard:
Most of the schoolyard lacks awnings; only the bridges above provide much in the way of a shaded area. The school's glass façade is one-way tinted, making it nearly impossible to see inside the classrooms, even on the first floor, unless right up against the glass. The open expanse includes stone tables and benches where outdoor lunch is an option, and some strips of greenery, though nothing taller than manicured grass a bit yellowed from the dehydrating Californian sun. There are two greenhouses on the southern end close to the Common Area where biology classes and more specialized classes sometimes take place; the insides of these greenhouses are severely humid, with rows of neatly arranged foliage and gardening supplies.