Made You Look: Ill. High School to Reprint Yearbooks After Dozens of 'Circle Game' Photos Discovered

Nick Kangadis | May 22, 2019
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All I can do is shake my head. Even when institutions acknowledge the actual meaning of something, they still backtrack because they don’t want to possibly, maybe, if-you-look-at-it-this-way get offended by something. The problem is that when said institutions backtrack they give credence to the BS assessment that they acknowledged in the first place. The sad part is that the institution I’m talking about in this case is a place of supposed education.

Students at Oak Park and River Forest High School in the suburbs of Chicago have said that they will be reprinting the 2018-2019 yearbook after they noticed that there were multiple students “of various races, ethnicities, genders and grades” played the circle game in “more than a dozen photos.”

The circle game is when someone tries to make another person look at them giving an upside down okay hand gesture below their waist. If you make someone look at the gesture, you get to give the person who looked two punches, typically in the shoulder.

However, because of a hoax by the troll website 4chan, idiots have given white supremacists power over the okay hand gesture claiming the signal represents advocacy for white power.

Administrators at the high school, much like the gullible front office of Chicago Cubs baseball team, fell for it and don’t want to take any chances, essentially giving white supremacists more power over the symbol.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

The high school will pay Jostens $53,794 to reprint the yearbooks, and officials say they hope to have the new books delivered to students by mid-June. To cover the cost of the reprint, administrators said they would transfer funds from the district’s furniture budget to the general budget for the one-time expense.

The school board called a special meeting May 20 to discuss the future of the current yearbooks, which have been printed and are currently at the high school but have yet to be distributed. In total, 1,750 yearbooks were ordered and printed, officials said.

“My understanding is [yearbook staff] followed protocol,” Superintendent Joylynn Pruitt-Adams said, according to the Tribune. “Things in this country change so rapidly. I don’t want anyone to think we are accusing our students of anything. For us, it was the impact of what the publication could have on the student body.”

Was the school board afraid the Cubs would ban them from Wrigley Field? I’m not sure what the school board was protecting the students from, especially if the students involved came from multiple different backgrounds.

People need to get over themselves and stop looking for things to be offended by. Either that or people need to stop giving generally benign things the oxygen that trolls and extremists attempt to give them.

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