Editor:

Do people really understand what it means to get involved in a school?

I am a Grade 10 student attending Sardis secondary school. Our mascot is a falcon by the name of Freddie and the student body is therefore referred to as the "Falcons."

Before we were dismissed for the Christmas break, we watched a video showing what it means to be a falcon, in other words, how to get involved at the school.

However, it quickly came to the attention of my social studies class that the video was incomplete. All that was shown was some scenes of our senior boys basketball team playing, a student-teacher dodgeball game, Freddie the Falcon doing pushups, and the drumline.

Is that really representing the student body?

Don't get me wrong, the basketball team and drumline are great ways to get involved, but there are many others too. The video showed no footage of the art programs that take place in our school or the many clubs that are being held every day at lunch, and after and before school. Other great sports such as volleyball or soccer were also not shown. Also, after watching this video, my teacher informed us of a competition a group of students went to. They organized it themselves, had to search for a sponsor teacher and did all the work themselves as well. This happened this past October, and the entire class, and I'm pretty sure most of the school, knew nothing about it. After all the work they put into it, don't they deserve more recognition?

Our school is also a French immersion school, which is a pretty big commitment.

Those kids do most of their classes in French, which would be extremely difficult to do if English was your first language. Why weren't any of those kids recognized in the video?

Also, I was astonished by the number of girls in the video. The number: 0. This was the most ridiculous part of the whole video because being a girl isn't like being in a club where the maker of the video would have to go to that club at the time. All they had to do was film the hallway during any given break between classes and catch a minimum of 50 girls. Another issue I had was the lack of multiculturalism. Our school has many First Nations students, as well as ESL students from other places in the world, such as China. Those students weren't in the video either. Finally, why was just the drumline shown? The line is a great program, but why weren't all the music programs shown? There are plenty of musically gifted students in our school that aren't in the drumline, but are in the orchestral strings class, or the rock band, or the jazz band, so why weren't they included?

The reason why this video really bugged me was all of these reasons put together. The video basically showed that our school focused on the Grade 12 male athlete, and the one musical area among many. That doesn't represent the student body whatsoever, so giving the video the title, "What it means to be a Falcon" was not appropriate. It also made me wonder, is that what the public sees as getting involved too? Is that all you can do to get recognition? I sure hope not because the student body at Sardis secondary is much deeper and more interesting than just being on the basketball team or the drumline.

Caleb Bloch, Grade 10 Sardis