This year is me and my friend’s first year in high school, and we extremely looked forward to the opportunity of the SCORE period. SCORE period, for people who don’t go to WHS, is a period where we have the opportunity to eat lunch, roam the building, and go to teacher office hours. Me and my friends deeply enjoy score, as we gather in the hallways after we eat and use our lockers as fun creative outlets, and get things done like homework, projects, and getting help from fellow classmates. 

Unfortunately, our school has progressively tightened the freedom that we have during this period. First, a maximum capacity was placed at the media center, meaning that only a certain amount of people could enter the room. We got upset, but at the end of the day it was not a big deal. Now, our school is banning us from using the hallways to sit and enjoy our lunch block. This wouldn’t be a big issue, but we have a major problem here. Our cafeteria is too small to fit the entire school. Before this year, there were two lunch blocks to eat, leaving enough room for everyone. So let’s say there’s about 100-200 students per grade. This means our cafeteria is large enough to fit about half of the school. This isn’t enough. We also have use of the middle school cafeteria, but it’s not enough to fit everyone in either. We have access to the gym, media center, and auditorium, but with all of the flooding happening in these spaces, it’s hard to focus and do things. It’s either too loud, or too quiet and you need to talk without getting in trouble. Then the solution is to go to a teacher’s office hours. For some of us with social anxiety and other things that make us uncomfortable, we don’t really like to just walk in and do work, and take up the teacher’s space. It makes us feel like teachers may think that we’re slackers, and don’t get our work done. This especially comes from me and my friends, having a variety of anxiety disorders.

I’m starting this petition to keep our hallways. If you give us our hallways back, we will ensure that we behave in them, as well as keep them clean. These are such a creative outlet to some of us, and we love to get work done in the halls, as it is quiet, but we can converse without having to talk over hundreds of others, already talking over each other. I’m sure this will benefit the population of Woodstown High School, and we can gain some respect back. 

If any administrators are reading this, please consider helping people like me to use the halls and having a nice place to work, communicate, and to use as a creative outlet.