It is not uncommon for kids to be brought up in private Christian schools; it happens all around the world and it is good for many kids to learn the word of the Christian God while getting a good education. I went to Delaware County Christian School all my life, from kindergarten to my senior year of high school. That’s thirteen years of my life I had to spend learning Bible verses and good Christian values. I have to say, I’m happy with the education I got, but I am far from calling myself a Christian, despite that being my first name. I am not happy with how the “Christian” school demonstrated its values and how the administration went about to punish misbehaving students. Many students at D.C. have gotten a detention for wearing hooded sweatshirts or who dared to utter any profanity. Unlike some of their peers, there have been students who have been unlawfully punished by D.C. simply because whatever they did went against the school's values. I am one of those students and I am ready to share my experiences of what happened at that godless school.

During my senior year of high school, I grew a lot and experienced much more than I did in any other year. I was seventeen, about to turn eighteen, I had a great group of friends and I had just been accepted to college. Life was great, but during my free time, I experimented a bit and tried smoking marijuana. Knowing I went to a strict private school, I kept everything I did lowkey out of the fear of being severely punished, but apparently, I didn’t try hard enough. Due to events that didn’t involve me, a kid had the unfortunate situation of having his phone searched for incriminating videos by the D.C. administration and what they found was videos of him smoking weed. Instead of deleting the videos and going about their life, they found it in themselves to pressure the kid into giving them a list of all the other kids that smoked weed. Not a specific kid who they’ve thought smoked weed or a kid who they may have suspected to have smoked on campus, but a list of all the kids that he knew smoked weed, and that he did. Without any evidence, twelve students, including myself, were individually called into the office to be questioned about smoking weed and all twelve students were punished by serving three days of in school suspension.

During this time, the twelve had to serve various labor tasks around the school, such as: clearing the walkways of ice and snow, digging sports equipment out from ice on the sports fields, ect. Along with that, the twelve also had to write numerous essays about how smoking weed affected the whole community, how what we did was wrong, what we learned from our punishment, and to write letters to staff members about how sorry we were. I’ll be quite honest, I’m not at all sorry for what I did.

Even though I’m well past this time in my life, I remember the stress and fear I felt going through this ordeal. I remember the judgment I felt when I’d be walking through the halls or when I was in class. The school I had went to all my life had outcast me as “one of those nasty kids who was smoking reefer.” The same school taught me to love my neighbor for we all are sinners in God’s eyes for He loves us all, but the way the teachers and other staff outcasted me and my friends, all for smoking a little bit of weed, was not only wrong, it was unlawful and a violation of our rights.

Along with punishing a bunch of stoners, D.C. also had its own “Scarlet Letter” situation.

We all know teenagers are going to do stupid things and how hormones are raging during high school, we were all horny teenagers at some point. Sadly, not everyone is a nice person. An unnamed and underaged female D.C. student was involved with a male student and during their involvement, nude photos were shared. Unknown to the female student, the male had saved her nude photos for his own keeping. Eventually, the two had a fall out and the male had the bright idea to threaten to send the girl’s nudes to the whole school and partially went through with his threat. After showing other students the nude photos on his phone, the very distressed girl went to a school guidance counselor and told the counselor what had happened. Once the school got involved, everything seemed to go against the young girl. After analyzing the whole situation, D.C. decided “it was for the best” to expel the female student and punish the male student by suspending him for the rest of the year, but will allow him to return to school this upcoming fall.

The last time I checked, this was not a Puritan society. Women are capable of deciding what they can do with their bodies without the worry that they will be branded with a scarlet A in this modern day and age. We all saw it during the Women’s March on D.C. the day after Trump’s inauguration: women deserve to do what they want with their bodies and to be treated equally. But from what happened in this situation, it is clear to me that Delaware County Christian School does not see this and does not care for the rights of a young girl who had also spent her whole life at D.C and was only five months away from graduation.

Now I haven’t been a student at D.C. since the summer of 2015 and I have absolutely no intention of sending my future child to such a disgraceful establishment, but after spending thirteen years of my life there, I hoped to see some change under the relatively new headmaster. Apparently, I was wrong. I highly doubt that D.C. will become modernized unless they put aside their misguided and outdated morals and make serious changes to their administration.