20 • THE GRYPHON Fall/Winter 2021
CREATING SP
A
By Yelena Jeune ’07
Being “one of the few” at CSW meant that you had to exceed expectations. There were few people of color in roles of power at the school, but the ones who were there never let us forget that we had to be exceptional.
s a teenager entering into high school, you know very little about what you should expect to get out of your experience, aside from a diploma and the hope that you will make friends. I had the unique opportunity to experience another private high school before becoming a permanent student at CSW. As school years start at slightly different times in the private/independent school community, I started the school year at CSW first, but after my first week at CSW, I was offered a bigger scholarship at another school that began a week later. In that first week at CSW, I reconnected with some friends from summer camp, toured a campus filled with art, took a course called “Food and Culture,” and I watched as the older students danced in the grass barefoot. I was both excited to start my time at CSW with some old friends and nervous that I would turn into one of the barefoot dancing students. Spoiler alert: my shoes, for the most part, stayed on. When my mother told me I had to leave CSW after that first week to attend the school that had given us more money, I was heartbroken and my experience there did nothing to make me feel better. I was surrounded by students who spent more energy flipping their golden tresses than they ever did dancing in the grass, there was no art, there were no “Food and Culture” courses, and more importantly, there were no friends. After spending some time at this other school, I quickly realized that CSW was the school for me and begged my mom to get me back in. When she did, I felt so relieved and when I stepped foot back onto campus, I knew I was home. My whirlwind beginning at CSW gave me a great deal of appreciation not only for the school itself and what it offered, but also for curating what my experience would be moving forward. I immediately locked in friendships with all of the students of color. There were only a few of us so naturally, as marginalized groups do, we flocked to each other. Forming the United Students of Color (USC) group during my freshman year only made sense. We all spent lots of time together already, but our time at the USC meetings was intentional and focused. We used our meetings to really get to know each other, creating goals and milestones for the group to accomplish. The group paved the way for me to have a built-in support system in a predominantly white institution, where I often felt overwhelmed and overlooked. We were all different, beating the odds in almost every avenue of our lives, many of us coming from single parent or low-income producing households. We did not arrive here by mistake or accident, nor did we have the benefit of generational wealth making our presence in private school all but a foregone conclusion like some of our white classmates. We worked hard to get here, we worked hard to stay here,
