Camp Day Controversy
A spaghetti relay event leaves many students feeling uncomfortable
Photo: Loobna Shego
Junior Sydney Goitia-Doran breaks spaghetti to symbolize her resistance and breaking her silence on the event
Head of School Ronnie Codrington-Cazeau owns up to the events that occurred on Camp Day and takes full responsibility.
On Camp Day, students from each grade, not knowing what the event entailed, volunteered to participate in the spaghetti relay. For Juniors, a group of students were selected in advance by Associated Student Body representatives and were required to participate rather than volunteering like they have in the past.
“At first I was excited to participate in school spirit because I like to represent our grade and UPrep is a great school,” Junior Sydney Goitia-Doran said.
The spaghetti relay was a game chosen by ASB executives that involved sticking uncooked spaghetti into other students’ hair. As a Black student at University Prep, Goitia-Doran felt uncomfortable with the idea of students touching her hair.
“The spaghetti relay was blatantly insensitive to black students at UPrep and openly disregarded a painful and demeaning history of mocking African Americans and our hair,” Goitia-Doran wrote in a schoology post addressing the situation.
Goitia-Doran made this schoology post after the event had not been addressed by anyone in the UPrep community.
“I felt like black students deserved to have someone speak up for them and that the wider UPrep community deserved to be educated on why it wasn’t okay,” Goitia-Doran said.
According to Goitia-Doran, just before introducing the game ASB mentioned that it may cause black students to feel hurt or discomforted, and thus were not required to participate. No student should ever feel that they can’t come forward and say that they feel hurt or not like a part of our community. — Head of School Ronnie Codrington-Cazeau
“It was really offensive that ASB acknowledged what the ramifications of their actions would be and still decided to have the game happen and that the entire upper school and faculty watched it take place and didn’t really do anything about it,” Goitia-Doran said.
Eight hours after Goitia-Doran’s post, Director of Upper School Joel Sohn sent an email to the entire Upper School. He explained that he had been talking to ASB behind the scenes to learn all the details before he responded to the situation.
“I am deeply sorry that my willingness to give time to learn the details of what happened has prioritized those who organized the event and did not address the real hurt and impact it has had on our Black students,” Sohn wrote.
Goitia-Doran’s schoology post was the beginning of change in the UPrep community.
“I’m really appreciative of the student who came forward,” Head of School Ronnie Codrington-Cazeau said. “No student should ever feel that they can’t come forward and say that they feel hurt or not like a part of our community.”
Two weeks after the event, Codrington-Cazeau made a schoology post publicly apologizing for the incident and taking full responsibility.
“UPrep, it is time to move forward while continuing to learn and grow from each other. Please continue to use your voices to challenge me how to grow and become the best Head of School I can be for UPrep,” Codrington-Cazeau wrote.
Codrington-Cazeau plans on setting up monthly meetings with ASB to gain insight on what’s going on in this school from students’ perspective in hopes of becoming a better head of school.
“I run this school,” Codrington-Cazeau said. “This is on me.”
Editor’s note: Junior Sydney Goitia-Doran is a staff member of the Puma Press. She was interviewed because of the large role she played in the event, but Goitia-Doran had no say in the reporting.
Loobna Shego is one of the web editors-in-chief of UPrepmedia.com and she has been on staff for four years. Her favorite type of stories to write are op-eds,...
