the Shallot Guide for Departing 8th Graders (2023)

From teachers’ obsessions to East Middle School closing to students anxiety about where they’ll be going next, this school year has definitely been rough. As the last class of East Middle School, 8th graders are excited to go to high school and at the same time sad to split up with their friends (after learning how to talk to people and pronounce the word ‘specific’). However, not all high schools are made the same. There is Palisade, the nerdiest high school in the district. Central, on the other hand, we actually do not know much about. Grand Junction, with its new future school has faced problems of everything.  Lastly, Fruita Monument, full of sports tryhards. This guide will hopefully help you find your way around your new home. 

Palisade High School has gone through a dramatic change since it opened. Before, it was a sports powerhouse, having the best sports program in the district. Today the students are dressed with perfect suits, polo shirts, and they play golf every Friday. They come and go throughout the school silently, in a 1984-like fashion, because they are afraid one whisper or misstep will result in them getting taken away and expelled. In fact, the Student Council recently made a decision to remove all couches and seating areas in the hallways in order for the students to “learn better”. Many students are elitist, especially the IB kids. It is rumored that IB actually stands for “Ignorant Boneheads”. The IB kids have been reported to hide after school in the library to live there and study for their CAS, EE, and all other types of acronyms. A lot of students even tryhard their grades, some even taking 5 AP classes as a freshman as well as doing 7 extracurriculars all at once in the pursuit of enrolling into high-ranked colleges like Harvard and Oxford. One student even exceed expectations by creating a NASA-like rocket, launching themselves into space, and landing on Mars before NASA and Elon Musk, in order to win a disagreement with their I.B. Higher Level Physics teacher. Lastly, you can not make fun of Palisade High School without mentioning its obsession with French Culture. In fact, they are so obsessed, the Colorado Government recognizes French as a native language for Palisade High School. Students can be seen eating baguettes and frog legs in the cafeteria, even though the school provides 5 star Caviar and A5 Wagyu steak. On a political scale, the French Club have managed to officially create a French Embassy in the school, and likewise a Palisade High School embassy in Paris. 

Another School in Grand Junction that literally no one knows anything about is Central High School.. To an extent, they are true, as their unofficial-official mottos by the students are, “The first rule of Central High School is to not talk about Central.” Aswell as “ what happens in Central stays in Central.” To add to the confusion, we don’t even know what their Mascot represents. Ever since the mascot change, many students have been wondering what the “Warriors” mean. Some have theorized that it means the “Warriors of Dorks,” since the school is somewhat of an oxy-moron itself, the logo being a shield but the mascot is a warrior. Others have even speculated that it means the Golden State Warriors, the NBA Team in San Francisco, even though they struggle at basketball. While they boast about their STEM Program, whistleblower students have come out, stating that STEM is actually a part of the Illuminati, under the disguise of STEM. Furthermore, students in the STEM Program are well known for their fighting ability, out of all things. A freshman who got lost and wandered into the STEM Hall was apparently hit with a Neuralyzer, unironically. Is the STEM Program actually a secret society? “Challenge” student Devin Espinoza came up with a theory, that the STEM Program, the Illuminati, orchestrated many of the district’s events such as: the resignation of Central’s and Grand Junction’s principal, changing the mascot of Central to a Warrior, and most importantly the closing of East.

Most of us will be going to Grand Junction High School, since you know, it's like right over there (points.) The students at Grand Junction High School are very diverse, as there are two sides to the school, the East Kids and the West Kids, or the focused kids who care about their grades, and the ones on their phones 24/7 who sleep and skip all the homework. On one side, students are so focused on their academics that students in the AP US History classroom even went the extra mile by declaring themselves independent and writing a full-on Declaration of Independence. On the other side, there are the West kids who probably haven’t left school in 6 weeks because they think “homecoming” is a literal event when they finally get to go home. At one point, a group of former west students are likely to have been discovered  in the storage room with improvised mattresses, sleeping and cuddling for warmth. Evidently, these two groups of students have been caused by the Uranium in the walls, especially the main building. Scientists are still baffled by the Uranium affecting the two student groups. Uranium has also affected not only the students’ perspectives on learning, but also their bodies. For example, a 9th grader who stayed in the office for the whole school day because they got lost was discovered with a third arm, a second nose on their legs, a glowing body, and a literal soccer ball fused into their head. The High School of Business programme offered by the high school has been leaked to not do any business at all, and has seemingly turned into a free-time program. Lastly, the school’s bomb shelter has been reported to contain large amounts of cockroaches and plutonium. In fact, there's so many cockroaches that it's been called the Fort Knox of cockroaches and/or plutonium by the students. Every once in a while students can be heard in the toilets screaming from these roaches accidentally escaping. With all of this happening, it seems like the new school will never be built, just like the Sagrada Familia.

Grand Junction’s rival, Fruita Monument, is full of kids coming from all parts of the district. From rural Mack and Loma, to the Beverly Hills Redlands,  it has caused significant inequality and division among the students at Fruita. According to the newspaper, skirmishes between the rich and rural have been taking place in the cafeteria and classrooms, with the soldiers using weapons of mass destruction such as wet toilet paper and cafeteria-food-mixed-with-chocolate-milk concoctions. However, their tryharding in sports has paid off. For instance, their basketball team has improved dramatically since last year. It is unknown how this transformation occurred, but there have been reports of bribery using ounce-sized bags of brown sugar by the Redlands kids. Fruita also has been infamous for its wide variety of sports, around 15,381.678 sports in fact (Dont worry, we did the mathematical calculations). They even have a sport called, “Shooting a Rifle blindfolded, on one leg, while singing in Spanish, while playing chess, and a 100 meter dash all at the same time”. Surprisingly, this sport is not as unpopular as you might think, as the country of Grenada officially recognizes it, and every month students at Fruita travel to Grenada to play the sport against the Grenada national team, because they can afford to. The students who can’t afford to fly to the Caribbean every month instead choose to participate in FFA, the Future Farmers of America. At Fruita Monument High School, the FFA can be seen carrying stacks of hay around the hall, explaining a continuous outbreak of hay fever. Everything from the couches to the TV is made out of hay and alfalfa. More recently, the security team busted an improvised corn silo operation created by the FFA located under a carpet in the FFA’s room. They were making around $5000 every day by selling the corn, unique blue corn, to the cafeteria chefs and other students.

No matter where you will go, you will probably get a new principal, or become one with French Culture, or get hay fever in the halls, or be hit with a Neuralyzer. However, one thing that we can all do is succeed through working hard, doing homework, joining clubs, making friends, etc. High School is an opportunity to find your passion and turn into success. Just one piece of advice: never EVER mispronounce the word ‘specific’, EVER.