Deaths, overdoses and accidents - all due to drugs and alcohol, and all in my four years at LHS.
Yet this drug problem has not been fully or sufficiently addressed by the school.
Yes, we all take health freshman year. We all sit through a few days of speeches about how drugs are bad and how we shouldn’t do them. But this doesn’t seem to get through to us.
Don’t drink and drive. It’s bad. Yet we’ve had that happen.
Don’t smoke weed. Yet a large portion of our students do so just outside the borders of LHS every day.
Don’t do prescription drugs. Yet we’ve unfortunately learned the hard way that they can kill.
The list goes on and on.
After each tragedy the school addresses the problem on the surface but not at the core. It offers counseling for students who have lost a friend yet fails to find new ways to end the drug problem that continues to exist.
When a student is suspected to be under the influence during school, they are sent to their dean for a serious of questions. Observations are made by the dean. If the student is found to be under the influence, they have a choice between five days suspension or three days suspension with a two day drug education class. According to Dean Jeff McKenzie, most students choose the latter. Follow-up meetings occur after this.
This is a wonderful program, but it has a major flaw. Students are only sent to their dean if they are suspected to be under the influence at school. The majority of drug issues, i.e. overdoses and death, occur outside of school.
A program that targets at-risk students and offers them help before they are under the influence at school would be beneficial. It is not difficult to try to figure out which students are using drugs outside of school. If these at-risk students were questioned, some might come clean and receive much needed help. If even one student benefitted from this new program, it would be worth it.
The school seemingly cares more about protecting its picture-perfect image than fixing the issues its students have. By admitting that it has a drug problem, LHS would call attention to the fact that its squeaky-clean image is a mere illusion.
And protecting the image of a school at all costs isn’t unique to LHS.
We don’t want to turn into another Stevenson and completely disregard our students’ well-being to keep an illusion of perfection.
Much of the negative things that occur due to LHS’s attempt to keep its image clean happen due to a lack of connection and communication between the administration and its students.
Teachers and even deans do an excellent job of communicating with students and understanding their culture. This is wonderful that they do so, but people who are higher up on the ladder fail to understand teens.
This lack of communication can be seen with the new sporting rules. Admittedly, lewd signs and clothing are things that were rightfully changed. However, the ban use of black face paint during football games was a bit odd. The administration felt that this was a racially offensive act, yet the students truly just did it to show support for our school. For many, many years we have had blackouts at football games. After all, black and orange are our school colors. The school ceased this tradition because they thought that someone might someday find this offensive. They did not really care about the students’ point of view. They just changed the rules.
LHS was ranked number 5 on the Chicago Tribune’s list of the top 50 schools in Illinois and is rightfully proud of those numbers. Its average ACT is about four points above the state average.
Instead of focusing on how the students appear to the community on the outermost layer of presentation, the school should work on the core issues of its students to better their well-being.
illustration by Taylor Alkemade
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