Prime Suffering Time

Melodramatic title, but stealing from Little Miss Sunshine can't be helped. High school is that fun period of existence where everything is played up and then promptly ignored. Really, the prime suffering time is middle school, but high school has its moments, for example:

1. Student government. This organization, which in theory can have an effect on school administration, currently exists to deal with superficial duties that no administrator wants. When in my junior year they were called upon to vote on a school policy, they voted unanimously against it, and the policy was implemented anyways. Thank you, Principal Glenda Basin, thank you.

2. Student Newspapers. Currently, ours consists of a bunch of self indulgent fluff pieces, a news article that might be decently done but comes out too late (waiting for fluff pieces to arrive), comics that even the most ancient Gasoline Alley reader will find dull, and ads for Care Net, the last of which I'll get to later. So, this is territory ripe for an underground press, but so far attempts made have only succeeded in not being the actual school paper itself.

3. Abstinence-only education. People are, by and large, not abstinent creatures, (the news says so). Rather than acknowledging that, we have abstinence-only education. While it can be an almost negligible problem when it is taught to one year of students, this was the year that my school got new health books. Specifically, health books that go from puberty to abstinence skills to pregnancy, with no mention of sex (except as something to be avoided), and no admission of the possibility of an unplanned pregnancy. These books will be used for the next seven years. Gah.