Student Body President Cecilia Zhou ’17, CALSA President Blair Cox ’17, and long-time local resident Jake Mackenzie ’17 spoke to the Mayor of Wallingford on the issue of street harassment in town yesterday, November 17. Although there have been isolated reports of street harrassment in previous years, this is the first time when students have taken the initiative to address this ongoing issue with local authorities.
During the meeting, the three students presented anecdotes from Choate students who have experienced harassment in Wallingford streets. Zhou stressed, “We thought it may be more effective to have students themselves talk to the mayor. We wanted to emphasize the human impact of these occurrences and really have him comprehend that we’re not just these uppity, conceited, privileged teenagers, but rather kids that may or may not feel safe crossing the street at night.” She added, “There are 13- and 14-year-olds in our campus who are being hurled abuse at in the streets and being called awful racial slurs.”
Mackenzie commented, “Having grown up in Wallingford, I’ve witnessed this tension between townies and Choate students for a long time. I think it is imperative for this relationship to be strengthened and improved because both groups need to coexist peacefully in Wallingford.”
Zhou delved into some more specific goals. She said, “One of the more amorphous goals of this meeting is to hopefully just establish more of an understanding between us and the town of Wallingford. More specifically, pertaining to safety on the roads at night, I wanted to see if there is anything the town and the school can collectively do to curtail street harassment — yelling, throwing things from cars — perhaps by stationing crossing guards at our crosswalks and having more street-lights to make the crosswalks more illuminated.”
According to Zhou, the idea was engendered during a meeting with Headmaster Dr. Alex Curtis, after students began to express concerns about the school’s response to the KKK incident. Members of CALSA had drafted a letter to the administration outlining the issue and offering suggestions about what they believed the school would do to ensure the safety of the community.
After agreeing that three would be an ideal number of students to meet with the Mayor, Dr. Curtis asked Zhou to select the members of the group as she saw fit. “As president of CALSA and a driving force behind the initial protests, I thought Blair Cox would be a natural fit. I also thought we’d need a more local voice in the mix, and I thought Jake Mackenzie would be a good candidate as well,” she said.
Regarding the specific choice of the mayor as the person to which they plan on addressing these concerns, Zhou said, “Because we already have a longstanding relationship with him, it would be most effective to go through him. Also, the mayor is someone who has been in office for a very long time, so he is quite familiar to the people who live in Wallingford, and if we were able to have him, say, formally support us, then I think that’ll be all the more powerful.”
Zhou remarked on the gravity of the situation. “Until recently, I had never really thought about it outside of the Choate bubble that we live in. Whenever someone faces street harassment here, it’s very much annoying for maybe for an hour, but then you forget about it by the end of the day. In any other situation, if somebody in the outside world was facing as many street harassments that people in our community do, that would be awful; that would be cause for outcry. Whereas here, we’ve faced it so frequently, we’re almost numb to it.” She continued, “If you look at it from an outsider’s perspective, it’s shocking that this is something that has become so normalized in our community and our lives here.”
