School districts around the country do not care for the teachers or students and we are fed up with it. We are high school students in the El Paso Independent School District, and we are tired of overlooking the many flaws and concerns that need to be addressed. We are aware that many of the policies are due to our local and state governments, and we hope that this message reaches them as well.

We remember being excited to go to school when we were in elementary school, you get to see your friends, do cool projects, and tell everyone what you had for dinner the previous day. Elementary school was a piece of cake, then we transitioned to middle school. The workload doubled and we were not as excited to go to school, but we still sucked it up because we got to see our friends and tell them about the cool game we just started playing. Middle school was challenging, but fun, and then we transitioned to high school. The workload tripled and we are seldom excited to go to school because there is no time to do anything, including telling our friends that we started having anxiety attacks. High school is hell and we transition from high school to the “real world” already burned out.

Comparing high school to elementary, there will be obvious gaps between the workload and even the education levels. We remember coming home and telling our parents or siblings all about our days and what we learned, but now we've reached a point where we go home and avoid socializing because we have hours of homework to do. Yes expanding our brain knowledge is good but it's inhumane of the school to be demanding it 24/7 out of children or teens that are only given the chance to behave like adults when demanded to. We, students, feel as if we’re treated as lab rats by the government, with schools adding more rules and expectations on us just to see how far one generation can reach compared to the past generation. We now go home crying from keeping in all the stress of having to keep up with grades and even extracurriculars. Schools want us to embrace our youth yet give us work that even adults don’t work on. We are tired of the countless hours we lose from sleeping just because a teacher selfishly thought they were our only class giving us homework, only to justify their action by stating the district demanded the students take work home. Hell has homework.

We heard that the plan for next school year is to shorten our already short lunch by 10 minutes and extend the school day by 15 minutes. Those may not seem like big numbers but with the demanding schedules we have now, these numbers are drastically huge. There are roughly 1600 students at our school and about 70% of them go to the cafeteria for school lunch. Although there are six different lunch lines, if you are not among the first 50 people in the cafeteria you’ll be stuck in line for about 15-25 minutes. Leaving less than 30 minutes to eat our lunch. 30 minutes is the minimum amount of lunch that prisoners get, but prisoners also get about 2 hours of yard time throughout the day for socialization and the chance to recharge. In this hellish place, we call high school, lunchtime is to eat, socialize, and destress, but we only have time to either eat or socialize. No time for friends in Hell.

Upon hearing the information that the school day would be extended we also heard that teachers would not be paid according to those extra 15 minutes because it accounts for the snow days we might have. Teachers are already severely underpaid to do impossible tasks and now we want to take up even more of their time. With the way some parents raise their kids, teachers are expected to be the parents, best friends, counselors, and security. Regardless of the fact teachers are not being paid enough and aren’t even getting enough funding to get paper for their classrooms, extending the school day by 15 minutes when we already end at 3:55 is monstrous. Hell doesn’t pay well.

We take 8 classes, are expected to do numerous extracurriculars for colleges to even consider us, and have to complete a number of volunteer hours to graduate. Those extracurriculars typically have a minimum of an hour-long after-school practice, and for most of us, it takes longer than 20 minutes to get home. Then when you get home you eat dinner quickly, do hours of homework so you don’t fall behind, and then shower. At this rate none of us are in bed and able to relax before 11:00. There is no family time and you are barely even able to relax because you are thinking and dreading the fact that you have to do it all over again the next day. Hell is busy.

The reason for the cutting of lunch and extending the school day is to add an advisory class to everyone's schedule. Advisory is meant to allow students that have failed any STARR tests, the proper time to make up those hours in school. For those of us that don’t have hours to makeup, we are stuck doing an assignment that adds no real value to our education. For example last week we had to make a PowerPoint about the items we would take on a remote island. Many of us took that opportunity to relax or work on other class work, but the admin goes around campus making sure that everyone is working out of the advisory folder whether you have hours to make up or not. That leads to the reason they want to make advisory a class for everyone, the students that are taking enrichment are not doing their work and they want to be able to make advisory a grade. The definition of enrichment according to Oxford Languages, is the action of improving or enhancing the quality of something. This is not to say that advisory is unnecessary, and making it a class is a bad idea, it is just to mention there are other ways to give students the time to make up their hours. One of them is, instead of adding to the day and taking away from our lunch just make advisory an elective that one is put in for the hours, or one can choose to be in as a makeshift study hall. Activities in Hell do not provide enrichment.

Another issue to address other than the crappy pay for teachers, and monstrous workload is security. We live in a country with little to no gun control and because of that, we have things like school shootings or shootings in Walmart. The thing is we are reactive instead of proactive, we have to wait until someone has lost their life or is in immediate danger to do something about it. On August 3, 2019, a gunman entered a Walmart, killed 23 people, and injured another 24 individuals. Now every Walmart in the city has at least 2 security guards standing outside during the opening hours. When the Uvalde school shooting happened all the schools in El Paso shifted to a clear bag policy for the rest of the year and that still didn’t prevent weapons from making their way onto campus. It is not that hard to sneak a weapon onto an open campus, which most of the high schools in El Paso are, which is why we need security. In the 2 years that we have been on campus, we have only seen campus security when there were protesters outside of the school. Even then the security guards were old and overweight. We do not feel safe at school, which is a full-time job and we know that it is not that hard to find 2 capable security guards to stay on campus during the school day. Hell isn’t safe.

In summary, high school sucks, we are overworked, teachers should be paid more, and we don't feel safe. Did we mention that high school is HELL?

We hope that with the opinions and voices of the community that changes such as extending the school day and cutting our lunch short, won't happen and we can focus on the actual issues like the lack of security.

Update: All of these changes have been confirmed and are being implemented in the 2023-2024 school year in the following districts; El Paso ISD, Yslet ISD, and Socorro ISD

To be blunt, our new hope is to spark outrage within our schools across the city. We want to reach parents, students, teachers, and everyone who claims that they care about the “futures of our generation.” We hope that the newfound outrage, encourages everyone, mainly students to stop blindly complying with the people who could not care less about our mental health, physical health, and overall our future.