Brighton High School is usually pretty good at spreading out responsibilities, but one area seems to have become everyone’s go-to solution for just about everything: the graphics classroom.

As a pretty well-defined student within this program who spends over three hours a day in room F2, where Mr. Sean Carney’s graphics dominion is headquartered, I come from a place of love when describing everything we do for this school. But lately, it feels like everything somehow ends up as our problem. If there’s an event or fundraiser, it ends up on Carney’s desk, then on mine or one of my classmates’. While we are definitely proud of our work, it’s starting to feel like the school couldn’t function without it.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s incredibly flattering that people throughout the school trust us to solve their problems. We appreciate that we’re the first people that come to mind when a design needs to be made or printed. But the fact of the matter is that we are still students. We’re juggling not only our own workloads but also whatever we need to accomplish. Every time a new project is put on our plates, the request is ultimately asking us to pause our classwork to squeeze in a project we didn’t account for. 

There are also other pressures not seen by the rest of the school. As a team that is consistently fantastic with deadlines, just a week ago we experienced two of our printers going down, one of which completely broke, which without finding an alternative solution could have not ended well for Leadership and the various other groups and staff members relying on the Graphics Department. Fortunately, everything ended up right, but the sentiment holds.

This isn’t about shutting the school out or refusing to help. We enjoy contributing to the needs of the school. Just, at the end of the day, collaboration works best when it is built in balance, not last-minute requests that end up looking and feeling rushed.