From its founding in 1950, Central High School has seen many incredible changes. It has endured as tens of thousands of students have come and gone over the years and huge reconstruction and redevelopment projects have been created.
(Image of Central High School Post-Renovation, 2020, Image Made by Pence Contractors, at Pence.net)
Through all this change in character, our high school has not forgotten its constituents. This has been made clear by the addition of the town hall hosted in our school’s library once a month during PSP on Tuesday. Anyone who would like to share improvements to administration is invited to attend.
When thinking about how to make positive change, an incredibly important question for our school appears: Where does it go from here? A global pandemic made time stand still three years ago, and many services vital to students’ academic success stopped functioning. To many students and faculty, a sense of normalcy has only recently returned to the school. With our educational system in mind, creating positive change seems difficult in these circumstances.
There are many hurdles our school must jump through, in large part, because of political apathy at the local level. A majority of the policy and funding for CHS is created by the state and local levels of government. Our school board is one elected group that creates policy runs our district, and allocates funding at the district level. Our City Council is another elected group who, among many things, form budget, and policy at the city level.
Our school depends on this funding and input to function, but data shows that in local elections, fewer than 30% of eligible voters actually cast their votes to begin with. The people who can make a difference here are all around us! It’s knowing this, that we can better make positive change.
So, what’s the future of Central High School?
The future is shaped by all of us. If we want change, we have to advocate for it! We can work for anything from later starting times to getting better communication with students, all the way to shaping our local school board or city council’s decisions. This can be done by sharing our issues with staff and management and organizing with other students.
We can create the change we want, and make the lives of future students much easier than our own. Students can get our local community involved. When we gripe about our problems, we invite change into our district, and our town as a whole. Let’s do something about it.
Article written by Aaron Villenueve and published by The Central Tribune. Sources used are pasted below.