R is for Respect
By sophomore year of high school, I’d finally reached the breaking point. As I sat in those green bleachers, I knew we were just minutes away from when the Pep Club would make their entrance towards the center of the basketball court, signaling the commencement of another school assembly.
The words, “Don’t you just love assemblies?” often echoed in my mind at this moment, although when they did, they always arrived as a taunt from some deranged clown from a sadistic horror film, instead of words of comfort from a trusted friend. The head of the Pep Club would then dart out from one of the side entrances of the gym and then take the mic from the principal, and then for the next hour, I’d be just another prisoner to another pep rally—along with 1,600 other raucous students.
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To be fair, it wasn’t that the entirety of every assembly was terrible—as it was mainly the Pep Club that I took issue with. The Pep Club was the group that was responsible for running the assemblies. It’s stated mission was “increasing school spirit,” although most of its mission seemed tied up in selling green and gold t-shirts and various other memorabilia.
The first issue I had with the Pep Club were its skits. In order to increase “school spirit” the Pep Club typically had these skits which involved a member of the Pep Club portraying a member of each one of the other district schools as embodying one negative stereotype. For instance, they’d portray one high school as being made of up all thugs and another school made up of a bunch of nerds. They’d then make fun of the student in the skit that was representative of the entire study body of the other school. It was encouraging stereotyping and promoting disrespect of people’s differences, as well as reducing the identities of these students to crude caricatures. These skits were fundamentally wrong, and they were also in direct conflict with the value of the “R” in the “Raider” of our school mascot, which as I opened my planner each day, I was reminded that this “R” stood for the defined value of “Respect.”
The other issue I had with the assemblies was the way that recognition was handled. At each assembly, the Pep Club would introduce the sports teams and then they would follow this up with a list of achievements they’d made. I had no issue with this, however, the issue was that none of the non-sports teams were ever recognized following the sports teams. The academic decathlon team, the forensics team, the debate team, and all of the other academic teams were never mentioned. It was as if they didn’t even exist.
This was also despite the fact that we had an academic decathlon team that had won the state title three times in the last decade. Conversely, the football team was terrible and had not won the state title in more than a decade. Likewise, here we were recognizing a bunch of losers, and the real winners were being left behind! It was unfair to leave out the rest of the student body, and I realized that something needed to be done.
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I don’t still have that editorial I wrote for the school newspaper, which is surprising, since I have almost everything I’ve written since then. I think I didn’t keep it because it was unsigned, even though I wrote the entire editorial. Editorials are supposed to represent the views of the entire newspaper staff, and having discussed the issues with the Pep Club’s skits and the way recognition was handled at the assemblies, we’d agreed that the Pep Club was in the wrong. However, there was some harsh language in that editorial. I remember calling the actions of the Pep Club “blatant hypocrisy” in one section.
Upon its release, the editorial created a firestorm. The head of the Pep Club, who for purposes of this piece, we’ll call Mr. Smith, which outraged. On the day of its publication, he confronted our editor in chief in one of his classes just minutes before it began. He then started yelling at him about how much he didn’t like this editorial that our editor-in-chief didn’t write. Mr. Smith had just assumed our editor in chief had written the piece since he was the editor-in-chief, which was of course not the case, as I wrote the piece. As you may have discerned from this exchange, he was not exactly the most evolved individual.
This situation ended up leading to a meeting with Mr. Smith and the entire newspaper staff, which included around 15 people plus myself. There, he reiterated how much he disliked the editorial, which was not surprising, as the editorial wasn’t written for him to like it. I’m not really sure how he didn’t understand that he wasn’t supposed to like it.
He in particular had issue with the “blatant hypocrisy” line, although we had defended it as trying to get a point across, although we again understood why he would be pissed off by that. We did concede that we could have used more sensitive language. I was very close to saying something to him at this point along the lines of, “Well, you know, you’ve been talking shit about people for two years now in every assembly, so I don’t think a single editorial calling you and your organization blatant hypocrites is that big of a deal really.” However, I didn’t say anything. I felt the editorial had said enough already. He also seemed pretty upset and I wasn’t really ready for a brawl to break out on the newspaper staff floor over an editorial.
However, during this meeting Mr. Smith did end up apologizing for being a dick about the entire situation, so I respect him for that. The whole situation of him confronting our editor-in-chief in a classroom should of never happened in the first place, but what happened, happened, and it’s still surreal that a teacher would do that to a student.
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It was a month later, and we were back in the gym for the first post-editorial assembly. The assembly began as usual, with Mr. Smith taking the mic from the principal. The sports teams then got their introductions and recognition, but then there was a change. Following this, The Pep Club then transitioned into introducing the non-sports teams, and after each one, each team then received their recognition.
There was a genuine feeling of excitement in the air as these groups were finally recognized, after having been shut out during every assembly for so long. It was also a special moment for me to be the catalyst to be able to give that moment to them, even if they didn’t know that I was ultimately the reason for it. Every one of those students deserved to be there as much as any one of those athletes did. We were one school—one Shawnee Mission South, and it was about time that The Pep Club got with the program.
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Finally, near the end of the assembly, it was time for The Pep Club’s skit. Were they going to be doing the same skit again? They came out from the sides of the gym, and the skit was totally different this time. I don’t even remember what the skit was about—I just know that the stereotyping and bigoted bullshit was over with. What I do remember is the somber mood of Mr. Smith as he entered the gym on that day. It was as if he had just arrived from a funeral and/or had just taken a large amount of tranquilizers. I knew at that moment that he knew that he’d lost. I was glad I’d written the editorial and I was happy with the result.
However, I should also add that a few months later at another assembly, The Pep Club showed up with a thinly veiled retaliatory skit against the newspaper staff, but it was so ridiculously bad that even I had a good laugh at it. We’d also already won, so I wasn’t sure what exactly the point of it was. I suppose it’s true that old habits die hard.
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After their final failed attempt at their return to glory, The Pep Club was finally defeated once and for all. Mr. Smith was eventually replaced as the head of The Pep Club about a year after the editorial ran. I graduated a couple of years later, but only after sitting through many more assemblies. Although, they were a lot more tolerable since the changes. It was also a true joy to finally see the academic teams consistently being recognized alongside their athletic counterparts—especially since in many cases these students were part of both groups. It was also a net positive to see the banishment of the badmouthing of students from other schools, since we were all part of the same greater student community.
Back at our school, The Pep Club had beat it into us for so long that it knew what school spirit was about, but in the end, to them, “school spirit” was really no more than a catch phrase and a couple of splashy colors used to sell T-shirts. School spirit was far greater than that though. By the time I’d finished that last word of that editorial, I fully understood what school spirit actually meant—and what it meant was being proud of being the students we were at our high school, no matter if we were athletes, academics, or both.
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