I remember how happy everyone was when bath salts were discovered at my high school, Camden Hills Regional High School. Of course, the Camden Hills community was devastated, but other towns and high schools seemed giddy with the news. It appeared they thought it was funny that our community faced such a terrible blunder; our rivals laughed at such an imperfection.

Rivals. Why do we, as a community, have so many? We are singled out, isolated from the rest: we have built around ourselves a wall of imaginary wealth.

The Camden Hills community has this reputation for being incredibly wealthy, and I suppose this isn’t entirely untrue or extremely troubling. What is ridiculous, however, is the assumption that everyone in this community is sitting on a pile of millions.

The online comments on the Camden Hills bath salts reports explain it better than I ever could. Some of them are absurd and downright mean, the highlight of them, with the most “likes”, being the following: “‘Oh, Muffy, would you like some monkey dust? It's all the rage amongst the commoners...’ ‘Thank you, Biff! I'll store it at school in my Louis Vuitton handbag!’” It saddens me to think that my classmates and I have this kind of image outside of our community. Many, if not most, students are not wealthy, and some families struggle to maintain financial stability. Assuming that we tote illegal drugs in designer handbags is hurtful and incorrect.

I realize that these sort of remarks stem from a jealousy; but this jealousy isn’t rooted in anything real. I won’t sugarcoat it, I know that our community has more money floating around than most. But people outside of our community don’t seem to realize how little this reflects about individuals or, more importantly, students of Camden Hills.
We are no different than any other student body; we work for the accomplishments we are proud of. Our sports teams do well because players invest incredible effort, our academics are admired because we have an incredible amount of diligent students. The character of our high school, and its admirable qualities, have nothing to do with money, although I can see why other schools would like to say so.

If other schools and communities feel the need to judge Camden Hills and its students, I hope they will do so based on our athletics, theatre, art, academics, or anything that defines us, because wealth certainly does not.

Zoie Magri is a junior at Camden Hills Regional High School.