No one ever says that high school is an easy time in the spectrum of life. Most adults look back at their high school years fondly, but wouldn't relive them for anything. Boiled down, high school is basically four years when young adults are trying to discover who they are, gain acceptance from their peers, plan for their future and pass classes all at the same time. For the most part though, fitting in at school is No.1 priority. Going against what is popular and well-accepted can lead to finding out just how cruel other adolescents can be.

     On the other hand, Talawanda High School has one student who doesn't mind standing out, especially if it helps her goal of making Talawanda a place where everyone fits and differences are celebrated rather than shunned.

     Chelsea Martens, a senior at Talawanda, didn’t plan on making the impact that she has. It just kind of happened, as she tells it, the second semester of her sophomore year.
“I was in minority studies and we were watching videos, and we were learning about different schools, with the problems they were having, I think that we were watching something called “School Colors”, and we were talking about relations at school concerning homophobia and racism, and I was just like ‘Something needs to be done here,’ and my teacher, Mr. Tincher said, ‘Why don’t you do something?’ and I said, 'OK, good idea'.”

     Chelsea had seen herself and some of her friends being hurt by discrimination during high school, and so the choice to try to make a change wasn’t a hard one. "I started keeping a journal of discrimination that I had seen. This student, he was gay, and he was threatened to be killed by the football team if he showed up to prom," Chelsea said, "His life was threatened. He was harassed every day. People were horrible to him.” This wasn’t the first instance of discrimination in a high school and it certainly continues today, but this situation helped to make a change at Talawanda.

     "This was the first year that people just weren't gonna take it,” Chelsea said, “My freshman year I was made fun of a lot, and my sophomore year, and we just decided we weren't gonna take it anymore." So, Chelsea became the founder, along with a few of her friends, they created S.P.E.A.K., Students Promoting Equality And Knowledge. The group is a place where students not only work together to fight discrimination in their school, but also a place to share the social frustration and concerns that high school can sometimes bring. "The first year [of S.P.E.A.K.] was such a wake-up call for the administration,” Chelsea said.

     Beyond meeting with high school students, S.P.E.A.K. also travels to the middle school once a year to encourage more positive behavior towards and between peers to motivate them to make changes to improve their school. They have also brought in community leaders, such as, Ennis Miller, ex-president of Oxford chapter of the NAACP, to talk to the students about the adverse effects of discrimination. They also participate in national movements such as National Day of Silence. This years Day of Silence was held on April 9. Students go throughout the school day without talking to represent both the harmful silence of not speaking up when some form of discrimination is happening around you and also the forced silence that is place on those being discriminated against.

     "The day of silence is actually an LGBT [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender] thing. My friend always says that gay people seem to be the only ones who want to save the world," Chelsea said. S.P.E.A.K. is "altering, but not watering down" the national event so that it doesn’t only focus on LGBT harassment but harassment in general.

     Although Chelsea will be graduating this spring, her expectations for the organization she started are as strong and focused as they were the second semester of her sophomore year. Since the cross burnings and hate mail in Oxford last fall Chelsea has been working on a new initiative for the group. “I went to the office and I said ‘OK, look. We just had four kids at this school who think it's OK to burn crosses in other kids’ lawns. Something needs to be done, and I'm sure you are planning things, but here is something that a student organization has planned’,” Chelsea said.

     Her plans are for a teacher workshop. Using the idea that if teachers were faced with the discrimination that has occurred in the school they would be better prepared to recognize and handle it in the future, Chelsea gathered testimonials from students who were discriminated against for a variety of reasons.

     Discussing causes of discrimination from race to socio-economic level, religion to sexual preference, a teacher workshop was organized including the testimonials in skit and print forms to share with teachers. While Chelsea has faced some opposition when it comes making this vision a reality, she will stick with this project until she sees the results that she is looking for.

     At a recent S.P.E.A.K. meeting, talk of summer meetings and helping the younger students who will be taking over the group was very serious. The group that started because of Chelsea’s dedication, will remain past her graduation for the same reasons.
Chelsea’s commitment and dedication are far beyond her years, though she claims that it is much easier to stand out and speak up about what she thinks is wrong now because of her age.

     Recently, Chelsea felt it necessary to protest the war, which was then impending, in Iraq. In doing so, she decided to poke fun at the comments made by United States government officials, telling Americans to stock up on duck tape and plastic by wrapping the two previously mentioned items around herself and wearing it throughout the day. While talking about her views on protesting the war in Iraq, she said, “‘I think that it has a lot more to do with your class. A girl who is a sophomore just wore a bandana [protesting the war] and she got a lot of stuff for it. I wrap myself up in duck tape and saran wrap, and one kid told me that we should bomb and kill everyone, but that was basically the only real derogatory comment I got. I got a couple of stares, but for the most part, kids gave me high fives, and kids thought that it was pretty cool. It definitely depends on where you are in the classes."

     There is no doubt that someone with her drive is a rare find in high school, and it is only outdone by the modesty she holds when speaking about the organization that she started. "All of what I have seen get better isn't from SPEAK and students speaking out against discrimination, but I think that definitely SPEAK has played a part,” Chelsea said.

Read a story by Michelle about Talawanda High School

Read an interview by Michelle with a Talawanda secretary