Is Northport High School diverse? Well, it matters how you see diverse. Are we diverse racially? Does our school have a similar amount of male and female students? Are there people of different sexual orientations, and do they feel comfortable expressing themselves? I’m going to try to answer these questions the best I can.

First off, let me just say something. A school not being diverse doesn’t mean it’s offensive. If the majority of people at a school are heterosexual, cisgender white males, that isn’t a bad thing. Contrary to popular belief, being born the way you are doesn’t automatically make you bad. Moving on, race. Is NHS racially diverse. To me, no. The school is made up of a large amount of white people, but what counts as racially diverse? When people think of other races, they think of people with a skin color that isn’t white. So, going off that, there aren’t a lot of “those other races” at NHS. We reach an awkward point here though. If we want to be more diverse, we would have to invite more “people of color”. If we were to do that, it would appear as though we were only accepting children on the basis on their skin color, which isn’t a good idea. So, how do we solve the lack of racially diverse people in this school? We don’t. I’m speaking from my point of view, but I have never felt like the school hasn’t answered to my needs because of my race. The school helps students as much as they can, regardless of their skin color. In order to become more diverse, we just have to wait. We as a school have come pretty far since the 1900s.

Next category: gender. From what I see, this school has a pretty even mix of boys and girls. The majority of my classes have female teaching, so that leads me to think that there are more women working in the high school than men. This category is pretty diverse.

Last category: sexuality. As with race, having a school of mostly straight people isn’t a bad thing. Importing people only based off of their sexualities is just not right. So, how diverse is the school? Well, I don’t know. You can’t tell what somebody’s sexuality is by looking at them, so there could be an abundance of LGB people in the school. I guess to “calculate” how diverse we are, we’d have to look at how many people attend the GSA. I’m not one of them, but I think that the school having a GSA is saying that we have a fair amount of LGBT students. Are they comfortable going here? Well, I don’t know. Again, I’m not LG or B, so I can’t speak for them. However, I and many others do assume that they’re well off.

So, what is this? Why did I write this? Well, the reason for that is because other members of the Port Press were talking about a variety of topics, and this was one of them briefly. While I didn’t get their opinions, here is my final statement: Northport is diverse. Diversity can be expressed through things you can’t even see. Although it may not look like it, this school is full of different types of people, all from different backgrounds. While some may just see a sea of familiar faces staring back at them, we have to remember that we don’t know everybody’s story, and that diversity can never truly be measured by what we see.