The hierarchy of high school has been the same since the beginning of time. The big bad seniors run the school with the stressed out juniors as their henchmen. The sophomores enjoy testing their new freedoms while the poor, isolated freshmen get all the backlash.  

“It’s been recently brought up to the juniors that we should be more unified as a grade and ever since then, I’ve been thinking, no, we should be more unified as a school,” Katie Thomas (11) said.

In a survey conducted on White Station’s student population, only 10% think there’s a problem with the way upperclassmen treat underclassmen. Maybe it’s not openly displayed, but it’s present when an upperclassman walks down the hall, sees another student not quite as tall nor quite as mature and thinks “Oh, that’s a freshman,”  as if being a freshman has some negative connotation.

“The upperclassmen’s impatience with freshmen frustrates me the most because we’ve all been freshmen, and we’ve all had to learn the system,” Amy Grace Humber (12) said.

Since when has it been acceptable to chastise a group of people for being younger and just beginning this awful experience that is high school? We all know high school is tough, so why not try to make the freshmen’s transition easier, rather than harder?

“Personally, I go out of my way to get to know the names of the freshmen that I run into on a regular basis. [I] compliment them.  If given the chance [I] show interest in what’s going on with their lives and make them aware that they are also important in this school and that upperclassmen care and that they are not all mean,” Humber said.

About a third of our students say they actively try to make freshmen feel welcome.

Seniors, next year when you go off to college you won’t be the ones running things anymore. You will be back at the bottom of the food chain, except this time, transplanted hundreds of miles away. No one is going to help you pick up the fragmented pieces of your life when things go wrong in college. You will want an upperclassman to help you navigate the ropes and show you the ins and outs of surviving college.

That’s all White Station’s freshmen want too.

Seventeen percent of students polled admitted to having treated freshmen with something other than kindness.  

Why waste your time and energy making someone else feel miserable?  Life and high school are both too short for that kind of nonsense.

“It’s been repeated throughout my high school career; you just feel a part of it now. I hate that. I want to look at everyone and think ‘Hey, they go to my school, I need to get to know you better,’” Thomas said.

Thomas has been working to eliminate this gap through her new club, Students Assisting Students. With the help of ninth grade principal Candice Smith, Thomas has structured a club centered around helping freshmen become acclimated to high school, where upperclassmen leaders mentor and tutor underclassmen in both life and high school.  

Upperclassmen must have at least a 3.0 GPA and a conduct of S or above to be considered leaders. Members must attend one meeting per month, which will be held every first and third Monday, to maintain membership status.

“It may not be malicious, but if an older kid is making fun of you, that can have a really negative effect on a person and helps carry on the legacy that that’s how those relationships are meant to work,” Humber said.