By Nicki Malekadeli
staff writer

It’s 7:30 in the morning and I am just arriving at school. I drive up to the school parking lot and see a group of kids going the opposite direction of school. I think to myself “where are they going?” After four years of my high school career, I figured out that these kids would be going across the street to Phifer Court to have a smoke. In my opinion, I don’t understand why these students would want to do this to their bodies.

It was a bit of a disgrace to the DHS community because it gave us a bad representation as a school. Parents who were driving their kids to school at seven in the morning saw these kids smoking, and it was obvious that they were not of age. This image that these parents were seeing could have skewed their view of what their kids were actually learning at DHS. In my personal experience, my parents did not know what exactly to think of the situation. The parents might have thought that “if this is what I see driving to school early in the morning, who knows what they do in school. ”

Another issue that was presented in my mind was that if these groups are expanding in size, by the end of next year, most of the population of DHS would be druggies. This was not only an issue for those kids, but for the students of DHS. Some of the underclassmen might have thought it was cool to do such things and start to get involved with it as well.

Also, my question was that if we have a School Resource Officer, why doesn’t he take care of the situation? When talking to him about it with Student Union, he informed us that these kids are off school property, so there is nothing that they can do about it. He also said that it was getting a lot better since the beginning of the year. Underage drug use is a big problem in our community today and should be taken care of, especially next to a school.

I am glad to see that this issue has been somewhat cleared. When driving to school in the morning, I do not see many of these kids anymore. This made me and others very happy as our school is apparently becoming a better community for us all.