The 2025-2026 school year at Tahoma High School has been filled with ups and downs.
With Homecoming week stirring excitement among students, to the stressful period of Finals Week twice a year, to the somber yet exciting ‘goodbye’ to the 2026 graduating seniors—this year has certainly been eventful.
Musicals:
Musicals this year at the esteemed Tahoma High School Drama Club included the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Water for Elephants.
Suhana Thakkar, a rising sophomore at Tahoma Highschool explained how the dramas were very engaging, and especially loved Tahoma Drama Theatre Projects Class’s ‘Two Weekends of Student-Directed Productions’.
Thakkar described that, “…the cast was charismatic, authentic, and well-put together…” and that many of her friends and classmates enjoyed the student-driven productions as well.
Homecoming:
The beginning of Homecoming season was marked with the classic ‘Spirit Week’, and with the dance’s theme being ‘Gotham City’ (from the beloved DC Batman franchise), countless students participated in showing their school spirit prior to the event.
Students even recall multiple people dressing up as Batman and The Joker during the spirit week and the Homecoming football game.
THS Freshman, Ahana Aneja, describes her enjoyment of the Homecoming dance, especially the dance circles that were formed. “[One of my favorite moments from the 2025-2026 school year was] the dance circle at ‘Hoco,’ where kids were doing flips and walks.”
Homecoming was an incredible experience for students who enjoy socializing with their peers and it is a great opportunity for students to get together and have fun.
AP Testing:
As May rolls around every year, students buzz with anticipation (paired with a subtle sense of impending doom) over their Advanced Placement testing.
With Tahoma offering a plethora of classes to choose from, student trends around this time include static studying during power hour, intense quizlet and Khan Academy speed-runs, and frequent visits to local coffee chains such as Gravity Coffee and Starbucks, alone with the in-school cafe, Bear Beans, a student volunteer-run coffee and drink shop.
Some of these tests include AP Human Geography, the largest Advanced Placement class, AP Psychology, AP Environmental Science, and so much more.
Though AP tests vary in class vs. test intensity, examples include AP Research, which doesn’t have an AP test, spanning AP European History, with a four hour exam with four different tests.
Overall, the time after AP Tests, as one anonymous student reports, isn’t any less stressful, due to the immediate occurrence of year finals.
Finals (Semester and Year)
Following the infamous ‘AP Tests’, the term ‘Finals Week’ signifies the final tests for the term, or even for the year.
Final exams span from big final projects to heavily weighted final tests, depending on the class itself.
Carly Poch, a rising junior at Tahoma High School, has some very strong opinions about Finals schedule.
Poch asserts that finals themselves are inevitable within an academic atmosphere, but the schedule at Tahoma is inconvenient for many students.
Her greatest argument is that having an official schedule doesn’t deter teachers from imposing earlier final exams, and then proceeding to assign another during the official testing week.
Stressing over tests, as many students concur, is not good for the mental health of Tahoma students, especially towards the end of the school year, when many students have already “…mentally checked out”, as one anonymous student explains.
