Extremely Lame

Grapevine High School in Texas is the latest school around here to engage in paper pushing, rules lawyering moronity. Anjali Datta is graduating high school this year with an impressive 5.898 GPA in a scant three years. She’s also got the best GPA of anyone in her graduating class, so she’s the valedictorian.

Nay, nay, moosebreath. The school initially refused to acknowledge her as the valedictorian because she was only went to high school for three years instead of four. That’s right, she’s being punished for being awesome and completing all the high school requirements a year early.

Of course, once word of this nonsense got out, the school quickly backtracked and gave Anjali the title of valedictorian. Ha! Just kidding. They continued to support the current salutorian as the valedictorian and made a new title for Anjali: valedictorian (three year). Because it’d just be too inconvenient to change an obviously broken rule.

Speaking of obviously broken rules, in Texas the valedictorian (or the person with the “highest class ranking”, which is by definition the valedictorian) gets their first year of college at a state school paid for. Even though she had the highest GPA of her graduating class, the school district made a decision that she wasn’t eligible for this reward either.

Sure, it’s not that big of a deal since she’s got scholarship opportunities coming out of her ears, but it’s the principle of the matter.

Maybe I’m making too big of a deal out of this. Maybe she should take it as an important life lesson that no matter how hard you work, you’re still going to get the shaft from myopic bureaucrats who care more about the letter of the law rather than the spirit of fairness and justice.