Letter: Lack of respect led to 'overboard' NHS prank
To the editor:
If anybody here needs to learn a lesson, it is the adults in charge at NHS!
For three days now (3/29, 4/1 and 4/2) we have read on the front page of The Daily News about the NHS Senior April Fools' prank, beginning with the protest sit-in, then the actual prank (much worse than the one originally planned), and today the reactions of local politicians and the school administration to the "Overboard' NHS prank." Our own Nick DeKanter, a School Committee member, is quoted in today's paper as saying that "the administration did a fine job" handling the matter.
I would call it a fiasco, instead. The previously planned prank was pretty harmless, if you ask me — a film, instead of classes, for part of the day on April 1? That the school could not accommodate this harmless prank, especially knowing about it in advance, that it did not listen to the protests from students following the denial of this prank and to the threats of something more radical coming, tells me that the NHS administration knows very little about the minds and hearts of adolescents. To let this escalate into the anger and sense of revenge that it did is a sign of weakness on the part of the adults, not the students. The single best way to put this behind now is for the administration to take responsibility for its own actions, and, yes, apologize to the student body.
I am the mother of two adolescents. I am also a former youth worker trained in adolescent development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and currently am working on a dissertation on the culture of youth/adult relationships in settings such as juvenile courts. I have given a lot of thought to what makes relationships between adults and youth work or go wrong. To put it in a nutshell: it all comes down to respect. If we don't give it, we don't get it. And that is a lesson that adults at NHS should have learned long before they took on the awesome responsibility of managing a high school.
