Attending school is an experience more than 7,000 students share in Revere. For us, it is a life we live every day, even during the summer. Especially at the high school level, students are busy no matter the month: working jobs to make extra money and feed themselves/their families, taking classes to pass with full credits, and experiencing internships and extracurriculars to explore our interests in order to find our futures. For some of us, being a student is the forefront of our lives, and for others it falls on the backburner. Getting through the day may be a challenge enough for some, let alone classes and grades. A mental health crisis permeates the traditional high school experience, further worsened by systemic injustice and inequality: high school may not seem the way it used to be, but many factors are out of our control.
Yet still, despite the challenges we face, RHS students wrestle with other pressures from the general public:
When we use our voice and advocate for our new high school to be built on a location that is both cheaper and safer as we continue our education, we are deemed “puppets”, with some even claiming our advocacy is tied to grades and class assignments. More than 100 students that attended the rally outside of City Hall this past March can affirm that there is no grade more important than a safer education for our siblings, relatives, friends, and future.
When we point out RHS issues, such as flooding, infestations, and inaccessibility, we are told that it is the “teachers that count” and not the facilities. RHS staff is growing, becoming more diverse and representative of our population, and yet they are still restricted by the limitations of sharing classrooms and unsafe school conditions. We cannot continue to learn and teachers cannot continue to teach in a school that is debilitated: fostering safe education is both a mental and physical crisis.
Instead of supporting the growing student population and diversity we have gained, we are told the city is “inundated” with incoming youth and immigrants: that we are therefore a problem that must be addressed. What must instead be addressed is how to accommodate everyone, not please those that are used to the systems of the past. Times are undoubtedly changing and the current RHS location is unable to fit the growing Revere population, both socially and physically.
They say, “youth is wasted on the young”, and yet we haven’t been given the ability to use it: to grow and lead in ways that will prepare us for our futures. We have been told that we are late, that we are unrealistic, and that we are naive. What we haven’t been told is that we are capable, we are optimistic, and that we care for our community. And you should care for us too.
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