Naperville Central High School

Naperville is 30 miles southwest of Chicago. Recently it was called the Best Suburb to raise kids. We have a population of 135,000. The poor kids (those families who make less than $150,000) attend Naperville Central, the oldest high school out of four in the city.

A school dichotomized by two major factions -- nerds/aspiring students and the rest of the OC-wannabe/stoner class. Central is also paradoxical in many forms.

Case-in-points:

1) Naperville Central had 26 National Merit Semi-Finalists this year. It also expelled 12 kids last year.

2) Naperville Central is home to a kid who WON the National Merit Scholarship with a 240 on the PSAT, and got 5's on the AP Calculus BC and AP US History exams -- despite the fact that he was stoned during all three tests.

3) Often a locus for great athleticism, Central routinely succeeds in football and aquatic sports. One of its star swimmers -- who won a full scholarship to Northwestern University -- was kicked out of the Olympic trials for being stoned.

4) We are allowed to go off-campus for lunch, but prohibitted from bringing our food back.

5) We have one of the wealthiest districts in the state of Illinois, yet our school is structurally unsound and is home to thousands of cockroaches that are at least 3 cm long.

6) Finally, Central is horribly over-crowded. If even half of the senior class decided to take the bus to school one morning or stay at school for lunch, we would have both a transportation and food shortage. We also have the lowest student-to-rest-facility ratio in the city of Naperville.

Our motto is the Redhawks.

We are home to a kid who is allergic to the sun and a stolen mummy.

Naperville Central High School is a raucous concrete jungle, but I will miss it -- not.

I love the smell of asbestos in Naperville Central High School.

At Naperville Central High School, it will not be uncommon to announce the winner of a national award, or a 36 ACT, and have the fire alarm pulled in the same day.

At Naperville Central High School, I saw many preppy kids, interspersed with nerds and stoners.

I swam over a tampon at the Naperville Central High School pool.

The grafitti in the Naperville Central High School restroom indicates that our school is filled with many preppy, Republican, closet Neo-Nazis.

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