You’re the new girl at school and are looking for some sort of guide on how to fit in for the next few years. You finally take a breath when a black-haired girl approaches you with a map of everything you need to know about the cafeteria cliques. “You’ve got your freshmen, ROTC guys, preps, J.V. jocks,” and so on. You know this scene if you’ve watched “Mean Girls,” a 2004 teen comedy movie, famous for their stereotypical groups at North Shore High School. Are those same groups here at Stafford High School? “I feel like people can obviously judge, but I don’t really think there are specific “mean girls,” said Emma Miller, a junior at Stafford High School.
Lyric Fravel, another junior at Stafford High School agrees,”We don’t have mean girls here, we have toxic people, but they aren’t ‘mean girls.’” Although some may not feel like there is a cliché group that runs the school, it’s hard to deny the halo of popularity that glows over some people’s heads.
When thinking of popularity, most minds jump to the cheerleaders and the football players decked out in blue and gold, but are these sports really what makes someone “popular?” Over 2,000 kids go to Stafford Senior High School. Each student has their own group of friends, interests, hobbies, and opinions, which are all factors that go into “popularity.” Some gain theirs through social media posts and high school gossip. Others gain it through kindness and connections. The jocks, the cheerleaders, the goths, the nerds—does everyone fall into a clique?
Most have their own view on popularity—what the definition is, who has it, and what determines it. “I used to be “popular,” but like it’s different now, being popular is just being rude and I don’t consider that being popular. Yeah, people try to be cool, and apparently cool has to be mean,” said Fravel.
Others think the opposite and that maybe there are some cliques here at school. Some fall into those social guidelines, while others don’t know where they might fit in. Brooke John, a junior at Stafford High School shares that view, “Yeah one hundred percent—I feel like people on different sports teams clique together because they’re with each other more, like track people hang out with track people—I also feel like there’s cliques within those cliques.”
Most have their own ideas of what popularity is; there’s no clear outline. Some people may think others are popular because they get put on a pedestal. However, oftentimes the people on the pedestal may think there is no status of popularity because they themselves are too self-centered to notice anyone else. So although most can spot a leader in a group of followers from a staircase away, at the end of the day, we are all just people who want to find “our people.”