Diversity At the Magnet - by Baltasar Farthinder, '05

By attending Union County Magnet High School I have much more multicultural and diverse classes. At my hometown high school my classmates would all live in my town. However at Magnet, I have classes with people living all over the county, and unlike a private school, Magnet is free for anyone who is accepted. This means there is more ethnic and cultural diversity and as well as being more socio-economically diverse. By choosing to attend the Union County Magnet High School I have been able to interact and form friendships with a more multicultural and diverse group of people.
In both elementary and middle schools I went to school with only kids who lived in my neighborhood. I did not even go to school with all the kids in my town because my town only has five elementary schools and two middle schools. Even in middle school I was only going to school with half the kids in my grade. These kids were very similar to me in many ways. There was some racial and ethnic diversity, of course, but people naturally choose to live in neighborhoods of people like themselves. There was also little economic diversity; these kids lived in my town and thus lived in houses comparable to my own. Due to the fact that Magnet is a countywide school, my classmates come from many different towns (some of which I had never heard of before). This allows for more opportunity for diversity.
One occasion when I realized how multicultural my classes are, was this year in my Calculus class. This class is already very diverse because there are students from all four grades. We were discussing how one could succeed on the math section of the SAT's without scoring well on the verbal section or even speaking English well. I realized then that the majority of our class could speak a language other than English fluently or came from a bilingual home. The amazing thing about this to me was that this wasn't just a class of kids who could speak Spanish and English. There were at least five different languages that students could speak other than English. And there were less than 20 kids in the class. On the contrary, out of my middle school friends not one could speak a second language with any hope of fluency.