Danbury High

[givingxinx2xyou]

so today me and beth and other people in big brother/big sister & peer mediation went to danbury high school for a peer leadership exchange thing (bc our clubs are basically what their peer leadership program is). and it was such a cool day. we got to dhs and got into groups with kids from dhs & other schools in the area like wooster, chapaug (new milford), new milford and some other schools that i can't remember and we played like the name game and stuff to get to know each other and talked about diversity, racism, etc. and other issues that are prevalent in our schools or whatever and then we got paired up with a dhs kid to take us around the school and basically do whatever for 4 periods. so me and beth and some other kids still didn't have dhs kids to go around with and i thought me and beth could go with the same kid bc other people from the same school had grouped up with only 1 dhs kid. but instead, they paired me with this black kid mo and i'm thinking to myself this kid must think i'm a stupid little white girl and is probably not too happy he's stuck with me, seeing as he was like, well what you would call ghetto. so me and him walked around and he was actually so cool. we walked the halls, met up with his friend darrell and stayed with him for 2 periods, went to his chem class and i met some of his friends who were also really cool kids (including this hot kid on the dhs wrestling team who was sooo nice), and then we went to this awesome class called multicultural issues. we almost had this class at rhs next year but it got cut from the budget. but it was awesome. the period before we had class, there was a HUGE debate that took up the whole period and there was an ok debate going on in our class but nothing compared to the other one (we were talking about lifestyles of gays and lesbians in relation to what happened to matthew shepard bc they were going to watch 'the laramie project' in class). then we had lunch, and they have a cafe fare there but it was like an actual restaurant kind of thing where the kids were like waiters and they had menus etc. then for the rest of the day we chilled and talked more about what perceptions we had of dhs before we came and what perceptions people thought of our own schools. the funniest thing that happened to me all day was when me and mo were with his friend darrell. we're in a random hallway (the school is HUGE with 5 floors and so many staircases i wanted to die) and darrell goes up to a lightswitch and turns it off. and then he goes "yea when i came to your school in the fall with the exchange, kids told me that when the lights went out like this in the hall that meant there was gonna be a knife fight" and i just burst out laughing and told him that honestly never happened ever - so yea that was a weird perception of rhs. and some black girl from wooster said she was afraid to come to our school for her friend's basketball game at rhs bc we have such a lack of diversity she felt like she'd be singled out and stared at, and i don't know how far from the truth that is but we definitely have very little diversity and the different minority groups we have tend to stay together and don't mingle a lot. that was the cool thing about dhs. there were so many kids all so different and they didn't look at you weird like you were from another school and like ask you a million questions about it, instead what would happen is kids would come up to mo and then he'd introduce me or they'd ask who i was and be like chill and just basically want to get to know you rather than being all 'who's that new girl' and look like i know we do at our school.

annnd after we left dhs we got to go to starbucks<333 and beth paid for my lovely caffe vanilla frappacino (sooo good) and that was that. so yea...i had a really fun day and i hope i get to go back to dhs. i also hope our school gets to host more exchnages here and we get to go on more of them bc it's a really different but cool experience.