Sorry if you dont like me ranting in your inbox like this but your recent post really resonated with me
My old school was literally named after having a community, and it was all about community and loving each other and whatever. But it had such an...outcast- I suppose- problem that the staff literally barely did anything about. The students outcasted the "weird" ones (like me) and we always were made fun of. The school was very obviously against blatant bigotry, but they were really bad with anything discreet, even when they were told directly about it by kids like me. You know it's bad when the students literally felt safe enough to say the n slur (a white kid said it, against a poc) multiple times.
Yet it always seemed they cared more about kids writing in the stalls in the bathrooms than the community they always preached about. (Literally they made a whole "write your name and time you went to and came back from the bathroom" thing because of that yet did a horrible job at "fixing" the bullying/outcast problem)
Hell! My mom said how she got a little annoyed too that she was never invited to or told about the facebook group that the parents apparently had despite the school being all about community.
One year, the year I left, the year that was too much for me, last school year, several new kids joined the school. Apparently they were a lot more blatantly bigoted and bulliers, and rubbed off on a lot of the other students there. So suddenly they had a big bullying problem ("oh no the outcast problem we've been told about so much is now too obvious to keep avoiding")
Yet they still did barely anything about it. They acted like they were trying but they really weren't doing a good job. So much of the pressure was put on the teachers (god bless those teachers btw, especially the ELA teacher, they were literally the sweetest teachers I've ever known I hope they never have to deal with something like that again), who couldn't do much because they didn't have enough power. Also the teachers were struggling to teach (and they made lessons fun!!!!) bc of the students :(
I was being very blatantly verbally bullied near the end of my time there, and I remember my bully shouting out her mean comments very loudly in class (while the teacher was trying to be silly with me). And I could see the teacher know he couldn't do anything except say "just ignore it." I could tell he wanted to do more to help but... he literally couldn't. Because guess who was ignoring it? The fucking staff. The motherfuckers who talked about community soooo much
Oh yeah also very very blatantly ableism last year against another classmate of mine (or well, wouldn't come across as ableism to people who wouldn't know why but definitely obvious bullying), and the staff handled it so horribly (I could rant about another thing here but you probably dont wanna hear it and this has already gone on too long lol)
Very very sorry if this was tmi/oversharing or something it's just that what you said in that post sounded like it would've come directly from my mouth so I felt like sharing /gen
(I'd get if you didn't wanna post this btw 😅)
yes, this is exactly what i mean when i say that while individuals might care, schools as a whole generally don't. I'm so sorry your school experience was so bad, that sort of thing shapes so many aspects of your life going forward and in my opinion, it's extremely important for children and teens to have positive experiences at school.
my inbox is available for people to rant in, it's okay <3
