Groveton High School - Tigerama Yearbook (Alexandria, VA)

Page 5 text:

September, 1968: Groveton students started the new year sobered by the occurrences of the summer—the violence in Chicago, the crushing of budding liberalism in Czechoslovakia. Though many were disappointed in their party’s choice for President, they were able to realign their hopes and the election provided a point of relevance between the school and the “outside”. And, surprisingly, not all involvement stopped with Election Day: Groveton students went on to make their wishes known in other areas. Outside was a world of change, a world where a last step toward the conquest of space was being made, where bastions of masculinity like Yale were opening their doors to women. It was a sad world, too: where Biafran children still died of malnutrition in a struggle for independence while our involvement in another such struggle kept us unwillingly entangled in our nation’s longest war. In preparation as heirs to this very world, students, backed by a student-oriented administration and faculty, attempted idealistically but rationally to solve the smaller problems of the school community rather than those of the “global village”. A human relations committee promoted new interracial understanding; “underground” newspapers acquired sponsors and came above ground as new chances for expression; while on the county level the attempts at a student union were generally abortiv e, the Groveton students developed this idea into an intraschool organization designed to discuss basic school policy conflicts and possible solutions; also devoted to problems within the school was the student-faculty committee, which could claim many important if minor achievements by the year’s end. Not every student was so involved, it will be argued; but the fact remains that some Groveton students did rise out of their apathy to try to bring sense and fairness to their world, an encouraging sign of potential. There were no campus riots to photograph as a visible symptom of this change; in the pictures—and the book—that follow and merely record impressions of the year, the reader will have to imagine for himself this “Zeitgeist” as an omnipresent force . .