American High School

When an institution for education feels like a movie set

August 2024

I call them prom movies.

They’re movies set in the hallways and cafeterias and gyms of big American high schools.

Footloose is the greatest prom movie of all time.

Grease is the second best.

Third Best: Ten Things I Hate About You.

Honourable Mentions: Mean Girls, Michele and Romy’s High School Reunion, Napoleon Dynamite, Juno, She’s All That …

But there are so many.

Thanks to prom movies, wherever you live in the world, you know what it sounds like when an American high school locker door slams.

You know the size, shape and heft of a plastic cafeteria tray.

You can smell the dust under the bleachers and the sweet lipgloss in the girls’ bathrooms.

You can hear the microphone feedback at graduation and the screech of basketball sneakers in the school gym.

I went to one of these schools the other day.

*

Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School is having a fundraiser, a massive sale of second-hand books.

We pull up to the school mid-morning on a Saturday.

I’m with my new friend Dee, whose children attended B-CC.

We can’t find parking. Dee knows her way around – and this is not a small institution – but acres of parking spaces are jammed. As we drive around I have to crane my head to take in the enormity of the school buildings.

We park on a side road.

On the way back up to the school, we walk past an enormous football field, complete with tiered stands and field markings unfamiliar to me.

Also unfamiliar are the lacrosse sticks being bandied about by high schoolers gathered damply on the field for Saturday morning training.

This is more like a university campus than a high school.

*

Dee tells me that public high schools in Washington DC can have school bodies of up to 3000 children.

That’s across four grades, not five. Our high schools start in Grade 8. Over here, Nine Graders are the Freshmen. Tenth Grade is Sophomore Year. An Eleventh Grader is a Junior and in Twelfth Grade you’re a Senior.

So a high school of 3000 students has 750 teenagers in each grade.

America’s most populous high school, Somerset Academy of Las Vegas, has more than 9 800 pupils.

This is staggering to me. Nearly 10 000 pupils means 2 500 in each grade.

UCT has fewer than 30 000 students, undergrad and postgrad combined.

At my son’s private school there are 65 pupils. Total. And that’s in seven grades: from six to 12. The school is at capacity, by the way. It’s a guarantee that there will always be fewer than ten students per grade.

Did you think I was working up to a point?

I’m not.

I’m only writing to tell you about the experience of being inside a huge American high school. How familiar it was, and how charged with the potential for drama – and romance and comedy – and how weird that was.

*

Once Dee and I make it inside, I can’t help myself.

Entering, the foyer is open and modern. There are wide corridors lined with metal lockers. There are hand-drawn posters on the wall, teenagers everywhere. An announcement sounds over the intercom.

“It’s literally like the movies!” I say.

I’m following Dee into the building now, past the volunteers selling coffee, cookies, sandwiches and hot pizza slices.

She continues at a clip, greeting teachers and volunteers as we go. Finally, somewhere in the bowels of this military-sized insititution, we locate the sale rooms.

Sale rooms? I’m tempted to say warehouses. There are tens of thousands of books here, laid out by category – and thousands of shoppers.

Some of these shoppers, I later discover, are book sellers, bookshop owners. There’s a separate table for them to pay, and some have brought their own boxes and wheeled carts.

Ordinary supporters of the fundraiser, like us, walk around with armfuls or bags of books.

We queue to pay then get our coffee and sandwiches, and made our way to a staircase .

It’s exactly like the one in the movie Grease – you know the one, where the T-birds attack poor Eugene on the first day back at school. Bullies are always hurting people’s feelings on high school staircases, don’t you find?

We watch people walk past: parents, shoppers and teenagers, so many teenagers – in shorts, in sports kit, in sweatshirts.

It’s unfair to think of them as extras in High School Musical.

For these teenagers, their school is just their school. Their clothes are just their clothes.

The letter jackets and sneakers of these students are not from Wardrobe; their footballs and backpacks are not from Props.

They have no idea we’ve been watching them for decades. We’ve grown up with them.

We think we know their stories.

Of course we don’t.

Photos from Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School and IMDB