Labeling Takes Its Toll

Not so long ago disaster struck a local school in New Jersey. Not a natural disaster, not one of violence, no! The kind of disaster that happens every single day, but a group of teenagers decided to make sure everyone realized the issue.

Everything that morning had gone just the way it always did, teenagers grouped outside of the school awaiting to be let in. Until about 8:15 AM, as every one went in but a group of teens that were sitting and casually talking outside. This was a group the teacher knew much about, he has known for a while that this particular group was constantly discriminated by the school body.

It was the clique that had been labels the “emo, goth, punk freaks”. When the teachers that were supervising buses asked them to go into the building and get ready for class they ignored them and continued to linger outside. The word spread through to the vice principal and he went outside and asked them to do what the teacher had asked them, but the teens still refused. After around 20 minutes of the one of the teachers asked why they were standing out there and not going into school. This caused everything to shatter and got out of control. The teens started to form a line and began screaming at the top of their lungs. None of the teachers there knew what was happening until one of the teenagers stepped forward and shouted

“We are sick and tired of this! You sit by and watch the jocks beat us up. You say that school is a place where bullying should not happen, you say that we should feel safe. It’s kinda hard when you are watching your back every second of the day in fear of being pushed to the ground! We’ve had enough! We’ve been putting up with this for long enough. It’s not fair that the jocks think that they can beat us up because we are different! It's not fair that they think they are better then us and walk all over us because we listen to different music”.

The other teens screamed “Yeah’s” as the allegedly lead teenager of the group continued to scream his protesting monologue. Things only seemed to get worse when other students saw the scene from the windows and began throwing objects at them as they linked their hands and stood their ground. While the teachers and the principal were trying to keep the situation they decided to answer the question that the vice principal kept asking. They stated that they wouldn’t come back to school until they were treated fairly. The principals were assuring them that they were respected and treated fairly but the lead teen stood out and asked .

“They’re throwing food at us! Is this what you call respect? If you do then we’re all out of here. You can give us all call when you decide to open your eyes and realize what they do to us every single day isn’t fair”.

And with that, they stalked off the campus, hand and hand. The school had known that clique issues were rising and that they had to do something about it but held off doing it because they had “other dilemmas to fix”, but it seemed that the teenagers knew that they needed a little boost to realize how serious this issue was.