For many seniors this isn’t the way they imagined their senior year would start. They may feel the freshman are ruining their senior year; a year that is supposed to be the best year of their lives.
What I don’t understand is why they’re upset. I’m a senior and I do not blame the freshman for the changes. It isn’t their fault. If anyone is to be blamed, the Board of Education should be for making the decision to change Free State to a four year high school. But blaming the freshman doesn’t make sense.
I doubt they want to be here any more than we want them to be. Everyone should stop and think about how they feel. Their chance to finally be the top dog was ripped away from them, and a sense of accomplishment was stolen from them by making them fast forward their lives and be placed at the bottom.
It’s also forcing them to act more mature than they really are. They’re being shoved into a high school where we are dealing with peer pressures, ACT’s, SAT’s and college applications. That’s a lot different than junior high.
There will be a lot of memories being torn away from them from their freshman year. I don’t know about the juniors and my fellow seniors, but when I was a freshman I was certainly not ready to enter high school. It was a big year for me, and I had a lot of maturing to do.
Many of us upperclassman need to realize that we are dealing with 14-year-olds. They are so much younger than us and do not have as much experience as we do dealing with high school issues. It’s our job to show them around and teach them what we know.
We don’t particularly want to deal with a whole class who is just afraid of us. We should all try and befriend a freshman and be a mentor to them. In the long run, it will help tremendously knowing that we aren’t here to judge them, but rather help them.
Like it or not, this change has as much of an affect on them as it does on us. We are all Firebirds. It’s one school and we don’t need a rivalry between freshman/sophomores and juniors/seniors.
As seniors we should be the responsible ones in the school and show a level of maturity that the others haven’t yet reached. We should welcome them, despite our own frustrations and embrace the fact that if we do our job correctly, we will have another class looking up to us and striving to be like us.
