Think about how many students at Malvern you don’t know. You know your core group of friends, most of the kids in your class, your teammates, but this still leaves a number of students that you know nothing about.

Malvern is not a large high school by any standards, especially when compared to other public schools in the area. However, our editorial board agrees that there isn’t a single student at Malvern, no matter how popular or involved they are, who can honestly say that he knows every other student in the school.

As a freshman, it can be intimidating to get to know your fellow classmates, let alone an upperclassman. Many freshmen are not going to walk up to a random senior and ask him how his day is going. They are just hoping to make a new group of friends and get to know most of their fellow freshmen by the end of the year.

Sophomores can be pretty similar to freshmen and may still be looking to find and expand their core group of friends. And by the time we consider ourselves upperclassmen, we are mostly content in the friend groups we’ve established. Throughout this process, nobody is really concerned with getting to know other students with whom they don’t typically cross paths. As a result, they go through Malvern without getting to know a number of other students.

At one of our recent newspaper meetings, we watched a Washington Post documentary that followed the newspaper staff at Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida. The video profiled the editors and adviser of the newspaper as they worked to get a memorial issue for the victims of the shooting out to the school community. Their staff did an amazing job in such a difficult time and were able to show the utmost respect and dignity to each victim.

Every victim had a beautifully made page and extremely well written biography about who they were as a person, classmate, friend, and family member. The goal of their memorial paper was not only to provide happiness to the families of the victims, but also to inform the people whom these students and teachers were.

One of the saddest parts of this was that the bios were written for them after they had died. Many students in the school did not have a chance to meet or know some of the victims. The memorial pages were their chance to get to know who they were, sadly—not who they are.

Malvern is constantly preaching about its brotherhood. We agree that it is an integral part of our community, but it can be lost if we only care about it at a surface level. If we are truly brothers, there should be a responsibility to get to know each other on a deeper level.  

We decided to do a brotherhood issue to tell the stories of current students at Malvern. The students profiled were ones that haven’t been quoted in any previous stories. We hope to let the Malvern community know who they are outside of just the classroom.

For our own sanity and budget as a newspaper staff, we cannot profile every single student at Malvern. We hope that by reading these selected profiles, you might find out something new about one of your classmates that you never knew before and you might find that you have something in common with someone you didn’t know.

Many students do not really try and introduce themselves to students in other grades because they either might not care or they might think that it will be awkward. Something as simple as interacting with someone new can often be so scary to us. It pushes us out of our comfort zone and can sometimes seem like we are “forcing it”.

Yes, it may be a little awkward at first, but if you tried to meet one new person at Malvern every day, it could have a great impact. It could brighten their day, and it might even make yours better in return.

Washington Post Documentary: How Parkland student journalists covered the shooting they survived and friends they lost