On Friday, December 1, Parker’s Upper School Student Government voted to remove the eighth grade from its constitution. Over the past decade, the eighth grade has slowly disentangled itself from student government, but with the passage of that proposal, they officially have no influence on Student Government. This change begs the question: how should the Upper School interact with the other divisions? We fear that this proposal, though clearly necessary, represents yet another instance of the divisions becoming more split from one another. Increasingly separating divisions runs counter to the philosophy Parker espouses, and we must do something to counter the trend.
Rebuilding the connection between divisions requires a change in Upper Schoolers’ attitudes. The Upper School doesn’t seem to acknowledge the Middle School. Perhaps Upper School students are attempting to distance themselves from their embarrassing Middle School past selves, or maybe they want to feel like the vast majority of high school students in the United States who only go to school with other high schoolers.
The fact is, despite only ever being a hallway away from a gaggle of Middle Schoolers and sharing a cafeteria with them, Upper Schoolers act as if there were no other divisions at Parker. A student who is new to Parker in the ninth grade can go their whole Parker career without stepping foot in the Middle School atrium.
Within the Upper School, younger students are seen as a joke or an enemy. Upperclassmen love to complain about freshmen being in their spaces. Despite being recent underclassmen, upperclassmen are often eager to get the new underclassmen out of sight.
The Upper School student body needs to make a major attitudinal change in how it views younger grades. Perhaps that change could be guided by adults in the Upper School.
Current active connections between the Middle and Upper Schools seem few and far between. The Middle School student newspaper, The Clark Street Journal, has welcomed some mentors from The Weekly in the past, but it has never stuck. Four Upper School Model UN members captain Middle School Model UN each week, which builds some relationships but also puts the captains more in the position of an educator than that of a peer.
High school students are being physically separated from the middle, intermediate, and lower school kids due to the deprioritization of these important interactions by the adults at Parker. Whichever it is, this separation is indicative of a larger issue. Finally, Big Sibling meetings are only required to happen quite infrequently.
We need some new ways to connect and need them to be set up effectively and in a community-focused manner. Three sophomores have recently started the FWP Sisterhood Club, aiming to pair underclassmen girls with upperclassmen girls to give advice and form friendships. “The Weekly” has yet to research how effective a model this is, but this is the right energy. We all have much to offer each other as community members, and any infrastructure that can be created to unite across grade levels and, hopefully soon, across divisions, is great.
The Middle School and all younger grades are also in the process of establishing their own student councils, thus gaining some level of self-determination, as Christina Merikas is writing about in her article for this issue. Middle and Upper School Director of Studies Sven Carlsson said at his recent visit to the Student Government Plenary that the Middle School is hoping the Upper School Student Government will give guidance to their student council. This is a great idea, but so far, Student Government and the Upper School in general have no idea how this is supposed to happen. That needs to be figured out soon if the school wants to do more than just talking the talk in this matter. This is a major opportunity to set up these new student councils in total harmony with the Upper School Student Government, and the opportunity may be getting away from us.
At the Corinthians MX each year, a Parker community member reads that excerpt from the Bible, Corinthians 12:14–26, likening our school to a body, with each part holding a vital and unique importance to the whole. “The eye cannot say to the hand, ‘I have no need of you,’ nor again the head to the feet, ‘I have no need of you.’” We are here to say that, now more than ever, the Parker body, particularly its oldest division of students, needs to heed Parker’s guiding principles.
