White Girls Club At Franklin High School Got "Out of Hand"

Impact

Thousands of high schoolers are encouraged to join clubs as part of their extracurricular activities. It’s all part of promoting a diverse and engaged student body. Clubs help to build your social network and look great on college applications, but if there is one club not to join at your school, it’s the "White Girls Club." I know what you are thinking: “Isn’t that essentially all of high school anyway?” Apparently, institutionalized racism wasn’t enough for some at Franklin High School in Somerset, New Jersey. 

The club appears to have originated on Twitter. Screenshots were sent to a local NJ news paper called the Home News Tribune, which is associated with MyCentralJersey.com. The tweets depicted students holding up three fingers creating the letter “W,” which apparently stood for the white girls club. It also appeared with the hashtag #wgc. The article went onto explain some of the other images they were sent.

“One girl retweeted a tweet sent out by a boy that says “the hallways in the high school” and then features a Twitter photo of a large group of monkeys or chimpanzees. That same boy sent out a photo of the Confederate flag hanging on a wall in what appears to be the bleachers in a gym with the hash tag “south will rise again.” Another post by that same boy said “I’m prepared to wave this flag around in a gym full of 1,000 screaming black people.” 

As one can probably imagine, when parents got wind of the article they demanded answers, answers which were not readily available. Franklin Township Public Schools superintendent, Edward Q. Seto, sent out a statement about how they were deeply saddened by the remarks, but that they were looking into it. On May 9, the board of education completed its investigation into the “White Girls Club” and what did they decide?  

The school directed all students to participate in counseling, Seto also invited parents to attend the counseling. The school didn’t make the details of the counseling readily available, nor have they said anything about what possible disciplinary action, if any, will be taken. That’s upset parents who believe that the school has slow to respond to the communities questions. One of the moms of the girls involved in the White Girls Club thinks that the counseling is just a bit much, stating, “I’m not very happy right now. I think the White Girls Club has gotten out of hand." 

What, only now it’s out of hand? You mean it wasn’t out of hand when your daughter was like, “Hey mom, I’m in the White Girls Club!” It wasn’t out of hand when your daughter came downstairs in a shirt that said, “White Girls Club Celebrates Pi Day?” I’m not saying I know what it’s like to be a parent, or that I would even be a very good one, but I would like to think that if my daughter started talking about "white girls" anything, I’d be concerned. The mother of one of the girls went onto say that the club was started by a group of eight friends as a joke. 

Jeez, it’s like nobody can take a joke any more. I mean come on, kids will be kids and parents will always be the ones who pass down their own racist beliefs.