by Anouk Shin ‘26 and Hannah Cha ‘25
When asked to describe the community at St. Mark’s, “collective”, “close-knit”, or “unified” may be on the list of words that come to mind. In fact, St. Mark’s is a school that advertises “unified community” as one of its biggest strengths. However, all 76 St. Mark’s students who were faced with the question, “do you believe that social groups exist at St. Mark’s?” answered with “yes.”
What could this response and other responses related to social groups at St. Mark’s tell us about our community? Does it not matter at all?
The survey results that were collected over the past week contained a lot of interesting and unexpected statistics. To the question “Which factor do you think defines social groups at St. Mark’s the most?” the responses we received are below:
57.9% of the respondents answered race/ethnicity as the most significant factor of segregation. Sports/activities (38.2%) followed, then sexuality (2.6%), and finally, financial status (1.3%). The results show that the majority of students at St. Mark’s think race and ethnicity create social groups.
Other than the statistics, another part of the survey that the writers paid attention to were the additional opinions given by the respondents. There were a lot of honest and compelling opinions, which also gave us a new insight into this issue.
Various students also shared their personal experiences of cultural differences causing a division of social groups. One of the respondents shared: “I think it’s normal for people like me that are Hispanic/Latino or African-American to be closer because we have similar cultures and relate to each other a lot. People think we don’t like them but in reality, we can’t relate to them as often so we aren’t as close to them”. A significant number of people were expressing difficulties related to each other, therefore causing segregation between races.
One point that was controversial among a majority of the respondents was: Is it realistic for the division of social groups by race to get solved? Some comments stated that it is “a natural process to have social groups by race because they share so much of a different culture”. They responded that forcefully trying to form social groups with diversity would not suddenly make any of the people in the group closer to each other. Some compelling arguments were also introduced: some people argued that the toxicity of segregation based on race should be considered a big problem, and people need to seek a solution by constructing more conversation and consensus about this topic. Can conflicts of social groups simply be solved by conversation?
The results of our last question were the most polarized, with 56.6% of students answering “no” and 43.4% answering “yes” to the question, “do you think social groups at St. Mark’s are harmful to our community?” The responses were almost split down the middle—ultimately begging a compelling question: Are social groups in school a legitimate problem to the community, or is it just an inevitable fact that needs to be accepted? We will leave the question up to the readers as we wrap up this article.