Transfering to a magnet school

I am a senior at Metro Academic and Classical High School which is a magnet school in the inner city of St. Louis.

I live in the Western suburbs of St. Louis called West County. Where I live in West County, people will go to the city for a few reasons. They’ll go to a St. Louis Cardinals game and really that was all I had been in the city for before my schooling.

Historically St. Louis has been segregated and there are streets where you can on a map, draw a line, and you can say that the black people live north of this line and the white people live south of this line. That has changed somewhat but the communities stick together.

White flight happened in St. Louis just like it did anywhere else.

The desegregation program that I am in that sends me to the magnet school I go to is called the Voluntary Inter-district Student Transfer Program. Students who participate in that program choose to leave their home district and go to a certain magnet school within the city.

That was a change that defined who I am today. When I walked in I saw African American kids talking to Hispanic kids talking to Asian kids talking to white kids. And that was something that I hadn’t seen in my earlier school and really didn’t know much about. That was a major change for me, just that simple interaction.

And it blew their minds to see me, this Jewish kid that wears a Yarmulke.

On the election of President Obama

We did a mock vote and I believe it was 99 percent of the school voted for Barack Obama. There was extreme jubilation when the election results came in. I mean, people were just so happy.

I may or may not have personally supported Barack Obama. I appreciated his message for change and for new beginnings but I doubted some of this hysteria that was built up about him. That essentially everything in society is going to improve, that the wars will end, that the economic troubles will end, racial tensions will end, that a new beginning as come.

Limits have to be put, I believe, on what we can expect of one person.