Do you remember your first day at this school? I do; it was last year. I enrolled later in the year, and when I came to the school for the first time to matriculate, I had already passed by two other schools looking for information, and one of them was an All-White school and the other one was an All-Black school.

When I arrived here, it was in the middle of the 1st lunch, and I was so amazed looking at all those different faces, and I thought, “This school is peculiar.” Now that I’m a student of this school, I certify that this is a really weird school.

There are almost 3,000 students at Miami Senior High, with different ethnicities, and a lot of different backgrounds. So how can all of this blend in one school? “It’s a good experience for the students to learn about different cultures in the world,” said school principal Mr. Valdes. “However, about the blending, it’s all about the students. There are, of course, expectations for the teachers to not have preferences and consider the differences, but we don’t expect anyone to behave in a certain way because of their ethnicity.”

Many students agreed with that. Nayib Jorrin, a senior, —and one of five students at the school who identifies as Multicultural— said, “It is a really special opportunity to be surrounded by such accepting people. Being Arabic, Cuban, and American, I don’t find acceptance really often, but in this school, ethnicity doesn’t matter, and that’s a good thing.”

Freshman Jade Santiago said, “Having diversity, it’s really cool. We get to see something that you don’t see in any other school.”

Apparently at Miami High, everyone is friends with everyone and they have the most mixed cliques ever. Danara Manzano, a senior, said, “Ethnicity doesn’t influence who they are. There are no barriers to make friendships here. I think that actually brings more to the table.”

Another senior, Caleb Rutherford, said, “People are just people; you have your own personality, and it has nothing to do with your skin color, religion, or country.”

Junior Fernando Ramirez, said that we are all the same. Despite whatever we are, we all have the same struggles.

But not everything is all hearts and hugs here. There are some people at this school who don’t like all of this mixing. A male junior, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “I don’t like Hispanics. I think they are all loud and annoying, and I wish they weren’t at the school.”

A sophomore male, born from an American father and a Puerto Rican mother, who also wished to remain anonymous, said, “I don’t like Asians, I don’t like wetbacks either, I don’t like Puerto Ricans, I don’t like people that don’t speak English…” (That person continued, but we will leave it there.)

A Hispanic female senior, who wished to remain anonymous, said, “I don’t like all the black people in the school. Some of them think they are better than us, and they always are listening to this horrible rap music. I think they are really annoying.”

Yes, those comments probably will make you think, “Do I really go to the same school as these people?”

Stereotyping others, however, is not acceptable to many MHS students. Junior Maria Bolboa said, “Everyone is different, and everyone can think however they want, but I think it is really barbaric to think in that way of an entire race just because a couple of people who are part of it commit a mistake.”

Junior Phoenix McClure said, “I think there are really ignorant people who don’t realize we are all pretty much the same. It is stupid to think differently of someone just because of his color.”

Sophomore Gabriela Garcia said, “I have met incredible persons in this school, and all of them are from different nationalities, so I don’t think we should generalize and judge people just by something so common as their ethnicity.”

Who attends Miami High?