You read that headline right. You felt attacked, didn’t you? It’s because YOU are to blame… for your own success and for your failures. It is not the school’s fault. It is not the teachers’ or coaches’ fault. YOU need to take ownership of your own success. Once you make that happen then the day will come where you find pride in your success and our school.

Everyone has heard the negative perceptions outsiders and even insiders have about our school. But it is the students who are the ones who decided to jump into this pit of negativity and there is no one to help them climb out except themselves. It’s finally time for them to do things on their own.

No one likes being looked down upon, but we have to face the hard facts. People laugh at most of our standardized test scores, our athletic teams and pretty much everything we do. They think we’re losers. Just look at a news website and find a post about our school. You’ll find that the people of Omaha don’t hold back when it comes to OPS schools or Bryan in particular. They have negative comments because most of what we can give them are negative facts.

While the average person knows that not all our students are dumb, unathletic nitwits, the perception of the school doesn’t reflect that. The students who are doing great things are being outshined by those doing the opposite.
As far as our athletic teams are concerned, the fall season wasn’t much to brag about. Varsity football and varsity softball each only won 1 game while varsity girls golf didn’t win a single match. Varsity boys tennis and varsity volleyball were the only teams to get 3 or more wins.

Because several of our sports teams don’t do great as a group, we are forced to find individual accomplishments which are always followed up with a “Well, we tried hard” and “we were like a family.” We single out the great individuals and say it was a team accomplishment. By doing that we are giving the other athletes credit where credit isn’t due.

Enough with coming up with lies to make us feel better about ourselves. We need to ask the important questions to find the answer to the problem. Did they really try? Did they really give it their all out on the court or on the field? The answer is NO.

Not a single team at this school has a practice where at least one person isn’t complaining about running laps or doing some drill. The greats never got great by doing the bare minimum, fighting their coaches or complaining about basic expectations.

All the same things can be said about the effort students put in their school work. Our clubs and special activities can be joined by any student, but students who join fail to see themselves truly become a part of these activities because they give up or drop it.

When a teacher sees a student give up, they believe they don’t completely understand the subject. They dumb down the material for their students to understand. No one wants to be the reason that the teacher had to lower their expectations.

Homework, taking notes, or simply trying to stay awake in class is how students at school define the word stress. The day kids grow up and see themselves face to face with real stress they might just faint.

We’ve all seen our peers or maybe ourselves come up with any excuse to not do work. Whether it’s “the teacher is so boring” or “I didn’t get enough sleep”, students come up with anything to feel better about their laziness.

Teachers can’t move on to more advanced things if we aren’t putting in the effort to get the basics. Therefore, if we want to know more, if we want people to look at us without pity because we go to this school, we have to do something about it. We have to change our image. We have to do our work and stop making excuses. We need to invest in ourselves.

If we students don’t care, why should the community? Why should they pause before saying something negative if we keep acting this way? We need to show that we’re not pathetic losers and that we do care about our futures.