School in Palos Hills, Illinois shares same name

Students slowly enter campus wrapped in warm sweaters, beanies, and scarves to protect them from the cold winter breeze, greeting each other with smiles and the occasional snowball is thrown at a friend to — Wait, snowball? Sorry, but this isn’t the Stagg High of Stockton, but the Stagg High of Palos Hills, IL.

High schools share a lot of similarities including their colors and mascot, though the Stagg here and the one in Palos Hills share a name, obviously; but they were not named after a president or civil rights leader, but after a football coach. In fact, there are only three schools in the nation that share Amos Alonzo Stagg High as their label. But still there are many differences, and some similarities, between the two schools.

Here, Leadership plans almost all of the student activities on campus while Palos Hills has a club called the Charger Nation.The two groups both do similar jobs yet they have different tasks and one difference is that any student can join the Nation at any point throughout the school year whereas a student must enroll in the Leadership Class.

“We definitely have a strong pride in our school,” said Salma Manaa, senior. “Every Friday students wear orange and blue to support our Chargers.”

The Stagg in Palos Hills is a lot like the one here in ethnic diversity, except instead of students being from both Central and South America and Asia, students there are from countries in Europe like Poland, Germany and Sweden.

Palos Hills has a club called MECA, and though it may sound similar to our MESA group, they have nothing in common. “The Middle Eastern Culture Ambassadors Club is used to expose our students to new cultures,” said Liz Panella, senior.

The Gay-Straight Alliance, or GSA, was just started this year and students said that, like MECA, the club tries to expose students to different ways of life. The alliance is trying to teach students that people are different and shouldn’t be treated any different from others because of their personal lives.  

Both Manaa and Panella are members of the newspaper staff in Palos Hills, and unlike in Stockton, only seniors are allowed to be on the staff though they do have other writing programs for lower classmen.

Here in Stockton, students are exposed to a number of different sports, but if one were to take a trip to Palos Hills, they would be introduced to some different choices including bass fishing, bowling, powerlifting, special olympics, and swim guard.  

As for clubs, Palos Hills has a number of unique groups, each with its own goal. The Business Club’s aim is to help students apply for jobs and also explain to them what the work world would be like. They also have a Debate Team, Cinema Club, and Color Guard, for students; this could also help them with certain types of careers.

Like the Freshmen Academy, Palos Hills has a freshmen class which aims to help students in the grade become accustomed to the new school. But here the students do not stay in the academy after their freshmen year as opposed to Palos Hills where each grade level has their own club such as the freshmen class, the sophomore class, and so on.

Not only are the two schools different, but the cities are quite the opposite of each other. During the winter in Stockton, the temperature can go down to the 20’s while Palos Hills can get below 10. In fact, yesterday’s high for Palos Hills was 19 degrees with a low of 3.

Maybe the two schools can learn from each other by adding new clubs or sports or even changing something about them. By just observing, they can learn new ideas and combine them with their own; and even though they are separated by thousands of miles, they still share something unique and rare that keeps them connected: a name.