Students at Memorial High School in Houston say tensions amongst their classmates have escalated after social media pics of college students posing for a themed get-dressed-up day went viral over the past week. Several junior and senior class students advised BuzzFeed News that they’ve been hesitant and scared to speak out about what they saw at the faculty’s annual “jersey day” lifestyle.
They say they found a handful of basically white college students calling the day “thug day” and said their classmates came to high school in cornrows, du-rags, and basketball jerseys and were flashing gang symptoms. After one pupil publicly criticized her classmates, college students say it has just made the tensions in the school even worse. BuzzFeed News has learned that both the students who at the beginning tweeted the pics and the scholars in the viral photographs are being threatened, doxed, and confused online and at school.
Last Tuesday, the controversy commenced whilst student Rachel Goodwin, 17, shared unblurred images pulled from her classmates’ social media pages in their “jersey day” costumes. “‘Racism isn’t a trouble anymore’ … Proper o.K.,” she captioned them.
Goodwin instructed BuzzFeed News she posted her classmates’ pictures to draw attention to what she felt was an extended-status “offensive” interpretation of a school spirit day.
“From as early as 2015, the youngsters had been dressing up in offensive costumes,” she stated. “The kids put on du-rags and cornrows to be ‘thuggish’; however, the one’s matters aren’t thuggish. They are cultural and a part of people’s normal existence.”
While she remains hopeful that her tweet can “ultimately alternate matters” and produce accountability and social recognition to her college, the communication has ordinarily devolved into hyper-non-public and violent again-and-forth assaults. Fellow students have messaged her telling her she’s endangering the lives of the white college students she’s criticizing and dangerous for her to tug her tweet. One man or woman even published her home copy online.
Goodwin stated that Memorial High School officials allowed her to stay home for the rest of the remaining week after acquiring a slew of death threats. She said she had not felt secure sufficient to go back to school because her tweet went viral. As with many school systems across the United States, Arizona Schools have several measurements and accountability programs to improve student scholastic achievement. One accountability program for the Arizona schools is the AZ LEARNS achievement program. AZ LEARNS holds all Arizona schools accountable for the performance of their students and teachers, measuring performance over several years versus a snapshot one-year measurement. The AZ LEARNS evaluation is based upon four established measurements already required by the Arizona schools. They are:
o AIMS Scores — Measures reading, language arts, and mathematics for elementary schools; and reading, writing, and mathematics for high schools.
o MAP — Measure of Academic Progress for schools, where students’ scores for AIMS and SATs are compared to the state average.
o Graduation/Dropout Rates — Used for the high schools.
o AYP — Adequate Yearly Progress measures student proficiency in the state’s academic standards of reading and mathematics over time.
The AZ LEARNS program for the Arizona schools categorizes schools on a graded scale as either: