Schreiber often prides itself on being a diverse high school with an entirely supportive environment.  And while one can’t refute the numerous religious, ethnic and political groups that we see in our town, you can, however, question the school’s ability to merge these groups in the classroom.

Within the classroom, there is definitely some isolation between social groups.  For instance, Schreiber offers English Second Language courses, or ESL, which focus on helping students with their English.  Although these classes are extremely helpful, they often end up isolating these students because they do not interact with the rest of the school in a classroom setting as often as they normally would.

“While I do think that the ESL classes are very well intentioned, they separate an entire part of the school.  If we don’t see these students in the classroom, it limits the interactions that we have with them.  Then, we aren’t really interacting at all and the separation is definitely there,” said sophomore Maddie Hiller.

Another divide in the classroom exists between the students who take honors classes and the students who don’t.  As a student progresses through their years in Schreiber, they begin to realize that their classes generally consist of the same group of one hundred students.  This is because the deliberate labeling of “honors” and “standard” classes puts every student into a separate grouping. 

“Throughout my years in Schreiber, it’s been hard to get to know my whole grade.  Unless you deliberately go out of your way not to do so, you only only interact with a small portion of the grade in the classroom.  This definitely separates the school,” said senior Emily Rubens.

As for divisions outside the classroom, many students are divided by their opinions on social and political issues.  Obviously, not every student in our school is going to have the same solution to issues such as gun control and school safety, but these diverse views are creating a divide among the student body.  For instance, during the walkout, people were motivated to participate for different reasons: some stood outside solely to improve the gun laws in our country, while others did in order to remember the seventeen innocent people who lost their lives in Parkland just over a month ago.

“Because of everything you see going on in the news, there are so many topics  to have an opinion on right now.  And it’s easy to see that not every student is going to agree with each other on these topics.  That can make it hard to interact with some people when their political views are so different from yours,” said sophomore Ava Fasciano.

Aside from the shooting, there is an incomprehensible amount of scandals, arguments and controversy that has existed in the past year alone. It is all too apparent that the student body has varying opinions on the current presidential administration, for example.

Schreiber may be diverse, but all of these factors prove that it is definitely not unified in all ways.  While this may seem unfortunate, it would be hard to make the school feel otherwise due to students’ varying political views, scholastic interests and course loads.

The most realistic solution is that students must listen to each other more often, rather than just isolate themselves from people who have opposing views.  Every Schreiber student should take every given opportunity to reach out to a new person and listen to what they have to say with an open mind.  Segregation definitely does exist at Schreiber, but it doesn’t have to carry on.