LETTERS: CJHS STUDENT OPPOSES RIGID RULES

To the editor:

I am a freshman at Cape Girardeau's Central Junior High School, and there are a few things I would like to bring to the community's attention.

At CJHS we get in trouble for giving our friends hugs. We can't wear our clothes the way we want unless it fits in with teachers' and principals' expectations of what we should look like. And if there happens to be a courageous student who decides to step outside their conservative boundaries, he or she will either be commanded to take it off or suffer the wrath of the teachers. I have friends who have been criticized to the point of tears by teachers for little things like wearing bell bottoms.

Boys can't wear makeup or fingernail polish, and girls can only wear what the principal approves. It's called freedom of expression. Why is the school board able to take away our constitutional rights. Are we not considered human by our American government until we reach the magical age of 18?

I have a friend who has her nose pierced, and she got sent to the office and forced to remove her tiny nose ring. "It's a safety hazard," they said. Yet students and teachers alike wear hoops in their ears big enough to shoot basketballs through.

In our school handbook it says that students' "mode of dress should reflect a wholesome attitude." This is the district's clever way of saying, "Whatever you have on, if we don't like it, we can make you take it off." They get to decide what's wholesome, along with the dinosaurs sitting in their school board office trying to block out the world and make sure that all the gerbils of students are as normal as possible.

I am a vegetarian and get very frustrated when I go to lunch starving but all I can eat is the redundant meal of chips and cookies day after day. This is because the food, including the salad, is covered in animal lard. When I told a teacher of my anger, he simply shrugged and said, "Well, that's the price you have to pay for being different."

You may be thinking by now that I am just some dumb teen-ager whose only problem is that she has too much free time on her hands, so she's trying to start a rebellion against the school. Actually, at the risk of sounding like I am boasting, I am in the highest academic classes for my grade level. I'm not just some bimbo who thinks it would be cool to be published in the newspaper. Speaking for myself and others at CJHS, there are a few things I would like to say to the school board.

No two people are the same. If you want to live your life with that fake smile and false sense of happiness, that's fine, but don't expect to take us down there with you. We all have feelings. Some of us are not afraid to let them show and be ourselves. Stop trying to block out the world. This isn't going to change just because of the teachers' criticism and badgering. It only helps us to hate school more and build up our anger to the point where we wake up with rage.

This is where you send your children every morning and where the future leaders of our community will learn to befriend, adjust, socialize, criticize and hate -- all because the schools would rather see us in straight uniform than have a school where minds can expand and people aren't afraid to be different. The school board discourages different.

These students will grow to think it is wrong to have a mind of their own and think they must always fit in and be normal, not even knowing what normal is.

I know too many snobs, too many stuck-ups and too many people afraid of themselves. The way I see it, my generation is already lost. What do you plan to do about the next?

WENDY STOTT

Cape Girardeau