Students work to cover up vandalism in and outside of school, but with a deeper purpose

Kylie Williams, Staff Reporter
Originally published January 9, 2018

A new club, with the intention of addressing teens’ endless rants and complaints about the world around them, has set out on a mission to cure the world of social injustices.

Rant Club has started their Not a Joke campaign to help counteract the bad messages and graffiti that are seen anywhere from bathroom stalls to telephone polls.

The campaign works to spread positivity in a time when rape jokes are being written on the school’s windows.

Junior Grace Stromatt in president of the new club. “The kind of overarching theme of this is feminism, and it’s not just about finding equality for women,” Stromatt said.

The discussion of the campaign came up during a club meeting when a rape joke that was written on a windowsill was featured on a Snapchat story. This made members of the club want to show support for people who are victims of the jokes.

“We came to the solution of obviously wanting to cover it up, but taking it a step further than that and  preventing those messages to begin with or counteracting them,” Stromatt said.

The club’s objective is to support anyone who is a victim of any kind.

“We want to make it so that we’re all on an equal playing field, so that women can have access to everything in the same way that men can have the same access to being emotional and liking pink,” Stromatt said.

Rant Club will soon be handing out stickers as a part of the campaign with different sayings on them.

“The stickers are going to be all black with thin white writing, so people can’t deface them,” Stromatt said. “They’ll say stuff like ‘rape is no joke,’ or ‘my sexuality’s not a trend.’”

These stickers will be handed out to students, who will be encouraged to put them over graffiti wherever they can.

“We want to put them in places like on water bottles, or bathroom stalls, window sills, telephone posts, that kind of stuff, where you would normally see those negative kind of messages,” Stromatt said.

Rant Club wants this campaign to spread as far and as wide as it can, through the stickers and their sister program in Italy, run by Stromatt’s friend Isabella Underberg.

“My friend Isabella was here for a week and she was at the club and she really liked it and wanted to start something like this at her school. I talked to her about the campaign, so now it’s going to be a global thing,” Stromatt said.

Students will also be encouraged to help spread Rant Club’s word when they get the stickers, which will be sometime in January.

“We’re gonna have a little hashtag at the bottom that says #notajokecampaign, so if anyone sees one, people can share it on Instagram or Snapchat,” Stromatt said.