Students Deserve a Voice

      High school  is the place people swear will help you and hear you when you have opinions, the place where sports run the school, where teachers only care about their pay grade. Of course, there’s academic guidance, but what does that matter when the students so clearly know that we are not cared for or heard. High school preaches about finding your career, prepping you for college, and hearing your opinions, but when issues get swept under the rug they cannot expect us never to notice. Countess times students haven’t gotten their justice because the teacher cannot put their pride aside to help a desperate student who more than likely had nobody else to go to, especially if they went to the school for it. 

     Public school is supposed to protect their students from perpetrators, bullies, etc. However, instead, they worry about their reputation and fail to see that their students are dying from the teachers’ lack of awareness and concern. There are countless people who have reported some type of assault whether it is sexual, verbal, or physical, the teachers here will act concerned for you until eventually they just sweep it under the rug and let the students fend for themselves in this terrifying school. It is hard to attend a school where teachers preach to give students a voice but are reluctant to listen.

     Having gone to public school since pre-k there have been countless times from a child to now a high school student, that teachers have let me and other students down and failed to meet the expectations we have. Administrators believe that students don’t expect anything from their teachers other than the education they’re here for, so when students become aware and try to make a change teachers abort the supportive facade they’ve been putting on. The walkouts, conversations, and articles mean something until teachers break them down by punishing those who wish to have a voice or make a change. We get told that we “Didn’t do it right,” or at “The wrong time,” but in all honesty how are we supposed to make an impact or a change if teachers don’t correctly teach and support how to make a change. We are only high schoolers and we are expected to let these vital issues consume us and not get any help for them, we are expected to just know “the right time” to do it or how. 

    School is supposed to be our safe place, but when administrators let people be victimized by their students, or let teachers just break students down, all of that goes out the window. School is no longer our safe place when students are shut up, and punished for believing in change. This school had failed students over and over again, we no longer want to attend this school, nobody wants to show up anymore, and we don’t speak because we’re shut down before we can even say a word. All this does for the students is leave us with the question: What more can we do?