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editorials
DEAR WHITE PEOPLE
PUBLIC FOCUSES ATTENTION ON WRONG PROBLEM
Staff Editorial
One of my favorite things about being a journalist is the ability to use my voice, which, if employed artfully, can make a powerful impact. This editorial was published in my first magazine that I oversaw as Editor-in-Chief, at the end of my junior year. I wanted to speak to a national problem that had only been worsening over the course of the previous few years: mistreatment of black citizens. I made sure to relate the issue back to my high school, and how it affects the students of Standley Lake in order to craft a more personal, more striking editorial. My co-editor-in-chief and I were stuck between the headline "Dear white people" and "Broken windows, broken spines." We decided to go with this one in order to strike our audience upfront and draw them directly to the editorial.
A broken window. A CVS window that was shattered because of a broken spine.
The window is not the problem here.
The problem is that Freddie Gray’s broken spine proves to us that racism is still alive and well. And it’s 2015.
The primary white response that we’ve seen on social media to the Baltimore riots has been accusatory of the rioters, condemning them for their violence and destruction.
Excuse us, but what actually matters here: property, or human lives?
African Americans have been prey to prejudice for hundreds of years. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was supposed to end discrimination and widespread bigotry. It didn’t.
Racism isn’t limited to police brutality. It is seen in the woman who tightens her grasp on her purse as she walks by a black man on the street. It is seen in the job applications that were rejected because of the African name written at the top. It is seen in the staggeringly high poverty rates for black people in cities such as Baltimore. It is seen in the unsanctioned policies like red-lining aiming to restrict the social and economic advancement of African Americans.
We have to understand that the riots are the result of an unchanging and very flawed system. No, we do not condone the violence and destruction. But the riots are a last resort for the people who have suffered for so long, without their situation changing. It is the result of drawn-out and long-standing hopelessness.
As white people, we cannot understand the systematic suppression that these people have been forced to deal with.
We can be passionate about our education, or politics, or religion. We can stand on street corners protesting what we believe in. We can show what issues we support and advocate.
But these don’t come anywhere close to the hurt and despair built up over generations upon generations of African Americans and other people of color being seen as “less than”.
Here in Westminster, we may feel detached from this everyday discrimination, but the fact and the matter is, no school, no community, no person is exempt from this reality we’ve created.
The fact that cop cars and pharmacies are more important to our society than the lives and advancement of a large group of citizens is sickening. This response just seems to prove that the rioters are justified. When yet another black person has died in police custody, we, as white people, speak in defense of the property. Of the broken windows.
It’s time to acknowledge the broken spines, the broken people, and the broken promises.
For so long, we have complied with a system that so readily discards the lives of African Americans, a system in which police brutality is normal and deep-rooted racism goes largely unrecognized.
This issue isn’t a black issue, and it’s not a white issue. It’s an American issue, a human issue.
Recognition is the first step to solving this problem. Not social media retaliations. Not undermining the importance of Americans’ lives and prosperity. When we fail to see how detrimental racism is in America, we condone a national lifestyle which largely disregards the lives of blacks, resist a crusade that is intended to correct an immoral system, and trap ourselves in an ongoing and futile civil rights movement.
published May 2015
EMPTY POCKETS
COLORADO K-12 EDUCATION LACKS FUNDING IT NEEDS
Staff Editorial
Our first cover story of 2016 was an in-depth investigation of education funding in Colorado. We found that Colorado is much farther behind most other states in both funding and achievement. My co-Editor-in-Chief and I used our staff editorial as a way of commenting on this problem and urging action.
It’s an ongoing joke at Standley: the technology is old and slow (and let’s not even start with the wifi), the textbooks are outdated and falling apart, and in our entire school there is only one Smart Board that works only some of the time.
It’s a little funny, but it’s more than a little concerning.
Schools in Colorado overall are not receiving the funding they need to perform the best that they can. It is so shocking to hear that in most other states, students and their families don’t have to pay for things like textbooks and uniforms. And that these states are performing better than we are.
Every single state that spends more on education than Colorado ranks higher in achievement. It’s pretty obvious that funding has a direct relation to how well schools perform on average.
On average, Colorado is spending $2,704 less per student than the national average. TABOR and Amendment 23 marked the beginning of the disintegration of Colorado’s per-student funding.
Let’s take a step back and look at how this is affecting anyone related to public schooling. Sometimes teachers have to pay out of their own pockets for standard classroom supplies. With every tax cut, less money is granted to schools, resulting in every family having to pay more and more for their child to learn.
We, as students, are here to learn. Without the support we need, some of us are limited in how much we can excel. If some families are left alone to buy certain school supplies that have important applications, low-income families are inherently at a disadvantage, and low-income schools are even more so.
Funding is not being provided where it should be. K-12 schools are incredibly important, and yet are not anywhere near the top of Colorado’s funding priorities at the moment.
Colorado is also the US state that provides the least teacher compensation versus professions that require similar amounts of schooling, stuck at 78% while a majority of states have percentages above 90. Our teachers have already been treated poorly as it is. It’s pathetic that people who are so instrumental in molding the country’s future are still not getting the compensation they deserve.
Nobody can deny how important education is. No sane government would say that elementary, middle, and high school funding are not at all priorities. So if we all agree that some new textbooks would be nice, why aren’t we getting that?
Hey Colorado, why don’t you put your money where your mouth is.