Hey, this is Avery Gatscher, She/Her, and Melina DiGiorgio She/Her. We go to Blake High School in Tampa. 

   Our school is dissolving some of our classes and we're trying to get attention and quite possibly save our class. Literature and the Arts is the only Honors English elective class offered at Blake and they want to take it away from us due to schedule mistakes on THEIR behalf. 

  We have to suffer the consequences. Blake High school is trying to take away 7th period Lit and the Arts. This affects us students who worked hard to get into a class that works best for us. They want to take away our period because they believe our class is too small, but other classes are overflowing with students.

   This class teaches us the stories of Mythology and Fairy Tales, we learn, through different types of media, the stories of the past and many cultures around us. It was very difficult to get into this class and many of us reorganized our class schedules to get here.

   As we are a magnet art school, we have the opportunity to receive performing arts credit for this class as well, (which is a graduation requirement) and it counts for honors credit. I have reached out to the administrative department at my school and they say this is the only option because of THEIR lack of planning months ago. 
   

    Many of the people in this class are graduating this year or next year, such as myself. The students of this class have contacted many artists, writers and musicians for this cause.

   We are sending this petition out to you to see if we can promote our cause to a larger scale audience and so that we may help them understand that people do care about our class and our teachers. This is such poor planning on the district and the school's part. Now, because our class is being dissolved, we don't know what class we may end up in. 

   The parents, nor the students were told about this in advance, if I hadn't told my mom, she wouldn't have known. They're playing games with our education and the students and teachers will suffer for it. 
 

  The worst part of it is, we're four people short for our class, when about 200 people signed up and did not get into the class. Not to mention all of the kids who were switched out of it to correct the schedule that the school also messed up. 
 

Please sign our petition, we hope you can help.

Also check out our Tumblr post that has over a thousand notes with updates and cool information, Neil Gaiman has even signed our petition. https://www.tumblr.com/confessionsofareindeer/728666949511462912/hey-i-dont-know-if-you-could-help-but-my-class?source=share