My School Is Not a 'Battlefield'

Recent op-ed columns and news stories about Woodrow Wilson High School ["A Battlefield Called Wilson High," op-ed, March 29; "Security at Wilson High to Be Tightened," Metro, March 21] make it sound like a school dominated by delinquents and thugs. But that's not the school I know.

It's true that, in recent weeks, the normal dysfunctions of Wilson High have escalated. Before spring break, there were several bad incidents in succession, which probably brought negative publicity more quickly than if the events had been spread out. There was a fight, two lockdowns because of gun threats and then two more fights resulting in numerous arrests. So, after spring break, students were ordered to remain in their second-period class for lunch. I was unfortunate enough to be stuck in biology, where I had to eat on a table on which animals have been dissected.

I wasn't too happy about that. But it's not an injustice. What's crazy is that suddenly, Wilson is viewed as a war zone, as a place where you can't learn or even walk safely in the hallways.

I know that is not the school I go to.

Take, for example, my English teacher. He not only grades more than a hundred essays done by AP English classes each week but he also runs the student newspaper, manages the student plays, coaches the varsity girls soccer team and somehow still has the patience to listen to teenagers whine about how much they have to do. My biology teacher plays guitar and sings songs about DNA replication to the tune of "Yellow Submarine." If you think I don't learn at Wilson, then boy, you are wrong. I can prove the fundamental theorem of calculus. I can understand French. (Well, sometimes.)

Even better are my friends at Wilson. Not only are they awesome and fun to hang out with, but among them is a girl who gets straight A's in her four AP classes, takes Chinese in her free time and is fluent in Spanish. Another friend got a perfect score on the SAT. (Suddenly, my scholarly achievements don't look so impressive.)

But that's beside the point. More important, I can walk down the hallway by myself without feeling like I'm going to get mugged or whatever people out there are saying is happening at my school.

Wilson is my school, my second home, and seeing articles describing it as a battlefield makes me think, "Huh? My school?" And then I read about two girls from my recreational soccer team, whose parents would rather pay $13,627 a year to send them to a Montgomery County school than send them for free to Wilson ["D.C. Parents Look Outside the Box for Public Education," Metro, March 31]. And then, after all of this, I went online and saw all the comments posted under Colbert I. King's March 29 column, and half of them said horrible, downright racist things about my classmates.

So I'm mad. I believe that Wilson is the kind of place that can change the social divide we have in America. There are kids from all over the place in this school, affluent and lower-income; the kids who get into Princeton and the kids who end up dropping out of school. We should embrace this kind of integration, not attempt to reverse it.

An African American teammate of mine on the girl's track team once told me, "I hate, hate the stereotypes. It's the worst thing ever." And she's completely right. So let's not stereotype Wilson High.

-- Paris Achenbach

Washington