ASFA: Closeness In Elementary School

The night before school starts should be a night of worry-ridden butterflies in your stomach and not enough sleep but for ASFA students that isn’t the case. Year after year of going to ASFA makes it less of a nerve wracking experience and more of a blasé “oh this again?” Allison Sharp, an eleventh grader, says that this start of the school year felt “ like the year without summer.” Students chalk it up to the fact that they did camps or summer college course, finally got a job, or maybe just hung out with friends every day. However, this isn’t the reason that ASFA can feel like a Groundhog’s Day place of repetition. What can make ASFA feel static is also what makes ASFA great: the closeness of the students. In elementary school, the most
exciting day of the school year was Meet the Teacher Day. It wasn’t the teacher that raised the excitement but the unknown of what student jackpot you’d be placed in. As a child, the first thing I’d do was walk around the room and look at every name tag on the assigned desks to see who I didn’t know and which friends would be with me. That feeling was there from elementary school to the beginning of high school. After ninth grade year, ASFA doesn’t give that feeling to its students anymore. The school has such a concentrated student base that you don’t have the option to not know somebody. You stick with the same friends and have the same teachers in the same classrooms until eventually it doesn’t feel like ten weeks have passed since you’ve last been there but only a weekend. ASFA has always been like this with its students; Creative Writing teacher and Alumna, Ashley Jones says that while she was a student “time passed by, but not really. Everything was kinda of the same; the same teachers, the same ASFA feeling.” Maybe ASFA lulls you into a cycle of school and breaks on purpose. The school is hectic and high energy and always changing. Perhaps, they just want to keep one thing the same: the feeling that you are an ASFA student who has done this before and can do it again with new life and creativity.