Two weeks ago, on November 29, the winter pep assembly got shut down. In a short time that followed, everyone was aware of what happened. Being an exchange student from Belgium, it was a situation that was unusual for me.

During this assembly, a couple students started Wi-Fi hotspots.  Students created other hotspots from the first, adding different names. It started with little joke but quickly went a different way. Racist, homophobic and some few other topics like bombing and shooting were expressed in the hotspot names and when the principal found out, he directly acted and made everyone go back to class.

First, in my country, we don’t have any assemblies. Because school is not home, school is just a place where you go everyday to learn, but you are not attached to your school. Except for the classes, we don’t have any activities in school. If you want to do something, such as sports or art, it will not be related to school. So all of the students are rarely grouped together. This situation would be almost impossible.

We also don’t have Wi-Fi at school and phones are normally prohibited. We can’t use them during school time, and the guard of the school can take them. So, we can’t hack a Wi-Fi that we don’t have.

Then, where I leave is a very rural place. So, in my school, we don’t have a lot of minority students. In my senior class, there was only one Asian student, all the others where Caucasian. So, we have little exposure to racism.

I didn’t expect a situation like this to happen and I was really surprised and shocked to hear  about what was happening.  I really hope the with this second assembly that we had about acting right, will make some students realize what they should not do.