By Elayna Kiehne
Living in Colorado is very different from living in Minnesota. But I’ve noticed one major difference: the schools. The size of the school is drastically larger in Colorado, which also causes more variation in the system. For example, there are more extracurricular activities, and there is a greater ethnic diversity in the students.
When I moved to Minnesota from Colorado, one of the first things that I noticed was how much smaller my school here was. In Colorado, just the fifth grade class was over 300 students! There were so many kids we had to have a track system to have a good teacher-to-students ratio, and to fit all the kids in the school.
At Fillmore Central, the entire high school is about the size of my fifth grade class! Last years graduating class was about 35, which is about 10 times smaller. My current grade right now has about 54, which, compared to my class in Colorado, still seems small.
Having a larger school is great because it offers more opportunities than a small school does! My school in Colorado had sports all the way from tennis and hockey to skiing and a chess club (we lived by the mountains where there were places to ski regularly)! The only down side was because there were so many of us, only the best of the best were allowed on the team. If you weren’t exceedingly good at something, you weren’t included.
Fillmore Central has fewer options for activities. While some people may complain about this, the small school allows everyone to participate. To have a full team, you can’t be very picky about who goes out. Thus, everyone can participate in a sport, which is how I ended up on varsity my seventh grade year of golf.
Larger schools not only have a variety of activities, but also people too. In my grade in Colorado, there were students with strong backgrounds of Chinese, Irish, India, African American, and more. Everyone was different, and most people weren’t related to each other, which is quite different compared to Fillmore Central.
Moving here was quite surprising, when you see this sea of white! Almost everyone here is related to each other, and they come from the same background. While it is cool to share genealogy with my classmates, you don’t get to witness different cultural experiences first hand.
My move from the Rocky Mountains to the Rolling Bluffs showed a drastic difference in my look at schools. My class size and diversity shrunk, along with the many opportunities. Despite this, I have closer relations to my peers, and am more included in extracurricular activities.
Elayna Kiehne is a student at Fillmore Central High School. She is one of eight area students participating in the Journal Writing Project, now in its eighteenth year.
Leave a Reply