This is not America. This is hell.

The school board tells us lies

Promising that they understand

Yet they don’t know 

What it’s like

To live in a world 

Where you are seen yet never understood

Adults blame their mistakes on us

Yet they have confined us to this prison

For eight and a half hours every weekday 

And proceed to send us home with hours of work to finish

Students all over America

Have claimed they would rather die

Than go to school

Has anyone ever thought

To question

The system

And not the students?

We have made countless arguments

Spending years of our lives

Cowering before adults 

Who promised us hope

Spending our childhood

Cowering before the injustice

Of the American school system

But our pleas our worthless

We have no voice

We have no power

We are the majority

Treated like a minority

We are the broken, the forgotten, the unseen, the misunderstood, the neglected, the unloved, the belittled, the hopeless, the mistreated.

We are the teenagers of 2025.

We are seen but never understood;

People laugh at our pain

As if our blood 

Isn’t on their hands.

This is not America.

This is hell.

-Lucy Danto