Woodrow Wilson High School has developed lots of traditions over the years, and kids smearing each other with all kinds of disgusting foods at an off-campus park is one of them. But when you get a bunch of kids together hassling each other with ketchup and apple sauce, it doesn’t take much to push things to the next level.
And the next level is what Channel 5 reported on last night (click here to watch the video). Apparently, the annual Big Sis, L’il Sis version of this event happened late Thursday/early Friday night, when junior girls "kidnapped" freshman girls from their homes around 3 a.m. Allowing a student out at 3 a.m. on a school day is questionable enough, and then things clearly got out of hand.
Read on to find out what happened.
From what little I know of the group (as the parent of two Woodrow boys), the "Big Sis" portion is senior girls who select freshmen girls ("L’il Sis") to mentor. From what I know, "mentor" is probably the wrong term, too: This is pretty much a group of "popular" juniors who pair up with "popular" freshmen as kind of an initiation into the rites of "popularhood" — there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, either, particularly if you’re a parent or student who wants to be popular (and didn’t we all kind of want that in high school)?
I do know this is not a school-sanctioned event, nor does it occur anywhere near the school — Woodrow is named in the report because that’s where the kids attend school. And it’s just a tradition carried on by students and a few parents, primarily white neighborhood residents, and it originated as a harmless way for kids to get to know each other. A similar event (Senior-Freshman Roundup) occurs every spring on the last day of school, when incoming Woodrow freshmen are "greeted" by rising seniors with a food bath; that event, however, is conducted during the day and wraps up with the fire department hosing down the buffet and kids; it’s also scheduled in a neighborhood park, so any parent who wants to see what’s going on can drop by and check it out.
According to Channel 5, what happened with the Big Sis event went well beyond making new friends — simulated pole dancing with traffic signs, shouting obscenities at fast-food employees in drive-thru windows, and the obligatory food bath. Had it stopped there, the event would probably have been chalked up as another of those dopey high school "experiences" that would have been better to miss. But apparently, again according to Channel 5 and the parent of one of the freshman girls involved, the freshmen girls were blindfolded in a local park and then either urged or coerced to remove their shirts and bras — meanwhile, some neighborhood boys (and presumably, some are Woodrow students) were nearby drinking, smoking marijuana and ogling the proceedings.
Nothing can be said to excuse any of this, because anyone who reads a newspaper, watches television or surfs the internet knows what happens when you take underaged children and involve them in some type of public display of sexuality — the police are called, the lawyers become involved, and I would say it’s pretty likely a few kids (and perhaps even parents) are going to be charged with some type of crime.
We’ll find out more and keep you up to date as soon as we can.
