The Court Filings of the Lawsuit Filed Recently are Available Online, Anyways, I’m a HS Student Right Now, Here’s my Opinion and Inside Perspective on the Current Situation.
I was surprised nobody had found this yet, it’s not exactly a huge amount of new information but there is some. I’m not expecting anybody to read this but if anyone wants to, you can, and to anybody reading this as a way to look at a students opinion for whether to sign you children up for SPA, I don’t want this to be a reason not to enroll them.
I joined SPA a few years ago after a very difficult time choosing whether to switch schools or not. I ended up choosing to switch and it was a great choice in general, but this is one of the worst handled situations ever. For a while I’ve seen the current leadership as faltering a little bit especially in their priorities, the idea that anything under maybe a B is bad is essentially ingrained in the minds of many of the kids in my grade and in general there’s a large amount of putting yourself down in terms of how good you are, but the leadership basically ignores this completely. Alongside this almost nothing actually profound besides bullying, our norms and inclusion are talked about, there are talks about important historical figures and activists, but the talks about them often miss the mark especially when it comes to anything to do with basically anything besides diversity. when the information about the sexual harassment came out, the Middle Schoolers (I was in Middle School at the time) got no information about it and never really did get talked about outside of students and the upper school.
I don’t want to say the school’s image is a façade, but the resemblance to something like Hoover’s FBI is scaring, before I joined the image of inclusivity and some elite education made SPA seem perfect, but once I was actually in the school for enough time it only sort of held up, the classes are good, but they’re not some insane elite classes, some choices in curriculum are weird (why are Math 6 and Math 7 basically the same thing? Why Do we treat a book that believes all racism stemmed from a Portuguese guy in the 1400s as complete fact? Why is there so many english courses for the most specific things ever like Asian Diaspora but no classes on poetry?) but in general it’s not bad, definitely better than my old school, not because my old school was bad, more because SPA has insane amounts of resources and many opportunities for students in basically everything besides english, and the athletics are basically perfect, I don’t find anything wrong with them, I’m not all that athletic but I do sports and really like the athletics program. Moving on, I haven’t had any personal experiences with censorship and dissent at school, I have gotten in trouble for a gc outside of school, but I think free speech and free press is one of the most important things in the world and the amount of control happening on pretty normal things is crazy for a school so dedicated to being forward thinking. I want to be a journalist when I grow up and I’m really into press freedom, I find that what the school is doing replicates a more controlling country‘s government like Laos (I know more about Laos because I did my ATW on that), their own statements remind me a lot of the type of optimism, quantitative focus over actual reality and “non-truths” made by the US during the Vietnam War by figures like McNamara. I don’t really have anything special to say on the Bauer lawsuit, the filings are really the more important thing.
I want to end this by saying I am not a pessimist. I think SPA has the capabilities and the resources to foster a meaningful change in the environment that makes or breaks the student’s lives, I only wanted to post this to voice my opinions so that maybe somebody is empowered like the Bauer dad to try and bring meaningful change to the community.