Joseph Di Salvo, president of the Santa Clara County Office of Education, has recently formed an anti-bullying advisory council to help address the growing bulling in high schools. With bullying on the rise, high schools need to foster a sense of community instead of separating students by year.
High school students file into the gym together, and immediately separate to find seats in the four distinct sections of the gym: green, white, blue and red, each color for a grade.

Students in different grades can play on sports teams together and take classes together, yet in every other aspect of school social life, teenagers are separated by grade. During dances and rallies, and throughout the year, classes are assigned different colors, different seats, and different boardgames, thus separating the students.

“To segregate by age… breaks the bonds of social life,” Maria Montessori wrote in her book “The Absorbent Mind. Montessori created the Montessori Method, which is a way of teaching students in mixed age classrooms. This method has shown to have superior outcomes compared to traditional education, according the journal Science.

At the beginning of my first high school field hockey season, my team stood in four distinct groups: freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors. At first the freshmen were intimidated by the older kids, but soon the upperclassmen were giving the freshmen tips and encouragement. The distinct groups merged together as the freshmen asked the older students about teachers and classes.

By the end of the season, everyone would stand together and joke around. But off the field, during rallies, dances, and even in the hallways, some teammates won’t acknowledge each other.
Though students of different grades mix in other school activities, such as drama and clubs, true friendships between grades rarely form. In middle school, however, many of my best friends were in the grade below me, but in high school, not many students can say that.

I attended Woodside Middle School, and though almost all classes and sports were separated by grade, the small size of the school and sense of community allowed friendships to form across grades. Besides having bonding activities within grades, my middle school had bonding among grades, turning the school into a community.
In an attempt to create school spirit, schools have grades compete against each other. Instead of creating spirit, however, these competitions divide the school.

“Rivalry can be a good thing, but at the end of the day, we want to increase school-wide spirit, rather than divide things up by grade,” senior Esha Roy said.

Later in the year, my club field hockey team met in the parking lot at 5 a.m. ready to leave for the first tournament, when a sophomore asked the freshmen if they brought tennis shoes. Not aware of the rules, all the freshmen were wearing cleats, which were illegal at the tournament. This clearly illustrates how without a comfortable relationship between the different grades, the freshmen are cut off from their most valuable source of information.

The younger students learn by watching the older ones; often the best teachers are our peers, said Montessori. Dividing the school by grades discourages the mentor/mentee relationship, and increases the intimidation freshmen feel from upperclassmen.

Instead of having traditional homecoming and spring fling competitions among different grades, dividing a large school into mixed grade teams, like the houses in the Harry Potter series or the groups during Link Day, would allow for friendly competition and create a sense of community within the school.