Two years ago, when I joined The Sidekick, I wasn’t quite sure if the program was a fit for me.  Contrarily, as I wrote my first story, I noticed how fulfilled I felt after learning about someone...

To listen to this story, click on the box to the left.  Dear Reader,  My name is Akhila Gunturu.  That’s 13 letters total. Six and seven in English, three syllables each in Telugu.  A-khi-la....

I started the school year with clear skin.  I was a very hopeful incoming junior. Online school meant an easy GPA boost, I was on the leadership team for The Sidekick and I was going to get a perfect...

The journey to adulthood can be a handshake, sometimes a kick and a scream, crawls for some, sprints for others, stings a fifth and consumes the remaining.  High school is the bridge between the sweetness...

To Whom It May Concern, You’ve probably seen The Breakfast Club, right? A movie about five high school students so different from each other that it feels impossible for them to do anything other...

I am a failure. I do things every single day that make me more of a failure than I was before. I procrastinate, don’t exercise or spend way too much time passively scrolling through YouTube, searching...

On Feb. 14, the day before the historic winter storm sparked power outages across the state, I laid on my back in the snow in my front yard, stared up at the sky and watched the flakes fall.  Supine...

After a semester and a half of doing school from a desk in my parents’ bedroom, I finally made the switch to in-person learning for the last quarter of the school year. It was a good thing my fifth period...

In the fifth grade, I told a girl, awe-struck, that I was jealous of how skinny she was. She turned to me, looked me up and down and said, “Yeah, and you’re… Well, look at you.”  In the sixth...

I was 5 years old when Barack Obama became the 44th president on Jan. 20, 2009. I was more than happy for there to be a Black president because Black Americans have been in this country for over 400 years,...

Junior year. Here we go. My fifth period class is Sidekick, the school newspaper. Am I going to like it? What would I even do on a newspaper? I went into my journalism class having no idea what to do....

Dear future incoming Sidekick staffers,  Hi, I’m the editor-in-chief that got stuck in the school year cursed with COVID-19. Well - COVID, a presidential election, a second impeachment, capitol riots,...