My alarm buzzed as I rolled over in bed, and I noticed it was still pitch black outside. What the heck. Why am I awake when the sun isn’t even awake yet. I glance at the clock which reads 6 a.m., and then I remember: I’m shadowing at Shawnee Mission East today, otherwise known to its students as “Shawnee Mission Wonderful.” I was going to find out if my vision of a public school (which was mostly a blend of High School Musical and Mean Girls) was accurate.

I crawled out of bed and set aside my pleated grey kilt for the day, realizing I had to actually pick out real clothes to wear. Is it socially acceptable to wear my pajamas? I guess word on the street is that boys go to this school, so probably not. Darn.

It took a solid sixty minutes to make myself somewhat presentable. An unheard of amount of time for those of us that are used to rolling out of bed in the morning and throwing on a wrinkled uniform skirt. I even brushed my hair.

This process is the norm for most girls who attend East, because they take anywhere from 20-60 minutes getting ready in the morning. Not everyone looked like they had stepped out of Vogue though. Junior Morgan Twibell wore gym shorts and a t-shirt and said she didn’t feel pressured to dress a certain way, she just wore what she wanted to. All I know is the stress of picking out an outfit in the mornings would probably lead to major anxiety attacks, gym shorts or not.

It was an extra ten minutes just to get from the car to the building. The amount of walking from the Junior parking lot into the school is probably more than most Sion girls walk in an entire day. And that’s not even counting the fact that there are five floors at East. So on top of your ten minute walk into school you get a really intense thigh burn every hour.

I was walking up the stairs to the main building when I first saw it. A boy. In all his glory. A real life, breathing, moving boy. On a Tuesday morning. Was I dreaming? Oh no, he totally just caught me staring at him, act natural! Or trip and fall down the stairs. That worked too.

Sweet Kim, nice job, you’ve already made a complete idiot of yourself and school hasn’t even started yet. I blame the male species.

I tried to make my way through the hallway, and I say tried, because there were so many people. Take the size of the entire Sion faculty and student body. That number is equivalent to one class alone at SME.

Herds of teenagers were trying to go in all directions through the same hallway and it seemed like chaos to me. I literally held my host’s hand I was so scared of getting trampled or lost. But I’m proud to say I did not.

When I asked SME students what they thought the Sion halls were like, I was amused by their responses.

“I just imagine like a bunch of chicks in straight orderly lines, walking the halls in silence,” one boy said. “Kind of like Hogwarts.”

Hogwarts? Did he seriously just say he thought Sion was like Hogwarts? So, does that make Mrs. Broderick Dumbledore? Sure, dude, it’s Hogwarts. You’re totally right.

Our first class was College Prep, a math class for college credit through Johnson County Community College. At first there were only boys in the room, and I half expected to hear Rockhurst’s “girls gotta go” chant when I walked in. Oh right, this school is coed.

The teacher came in and started handing out tests, reminding students that their phones should not serve as their brains. I counted a whopping twenty-eight students in the class. The girl sitting in front of me got mad and actually asked why I didn’t have to take the test. Um, I don’t even go here, that’s why.

Shawnee Mission East uses block scheduling on Wednesdays and Thursdays, meaning they only have half their classes in one day, so they had an hour and a half to complete the test. When I heard the teacher say what time class got out, I thought it was some sort of sick joke.

I can hardly sit through the brutal 51 minute full schedule Mondays, how can I survive an hour and a half? I did survive, but only because I was staring at a boy across the room the entire time.

“I barely notice how long classes are and getting two days to complete homework is beneficial,” junior Quincy Hendricks said. For testing purposes an hour and a half class period would be helpful, because I know I would give my right foot for extra time on one of Ms. Pennock’s US History tests.

Second hour was Harbinger class, Shawnee Mission East’s national award-winning newspaper. As soon as the door opened, I was completely overwhelmed by the amount of people in the publication rooms. They have about 70 students on staff compared to our tiny (but totally amazing) 20 person staff on Le Journal.

The boys were loud; blasting music and making immature jokes that I am ashamed to say I found hilarious. One random boy even asked me out on a date. But when it came time to work, they worked hard.

One boy sang Fergie at the top of his lungs for the duration of the class but also managed to finish his newspaper spread efficiently. And let me tell you, it looked AWESOME.

I was shocked at how well the boys and girls worked together. If you stuck a Rockhurst boy and a Sion girl next to each other and told them to write a newspaper, I’m not confident they’d be able to do it nicely, but the Harbinger staff did it flawlessly. And they did it well. Boys helped girls just as much as girls helped boys, and no one fought. The teacher allowed students to run the entire class independently. They made all the decisions.

The mixture of boys and girls trickled through the halls as we made our way to the humongous cafeteria. Think Mean Girls cafeteria, but not mean. I walked by the Student Resource Officer on my way to a table, imagining what kind of things a police officer would do at Sion. Maybe he could crack the mystery of the yellow water in the South Six? Arrest people for leaving lunch tables without washing them?

The first thing I noticed was that girls and boys were mostly separated at tables.

“So many boys are good friends and so many girls are good friends that there wouldn’t be room for us to mix at a table,” junior Alexandra Maday said.

It was true, the girls I sat with hardly fit in one long lunch table as it was. No one sat alone, no one ate lunch in the bathroom (I checked). Some couples sat together and held hands, but I didn’t see any major PDA.

In marketing class people slept, talked, and a boy in the back row took his shoes off and rested them on his table. I might have been hallucinating but I think I could smell them from across the room.

The fourth and last class of the day was seminar. This is where everyone in the school goes to an assigned classroom for what is basically a study hall, or an opportunity for parents to check students out early. The majority of the class talked and listened to music. I found myself staring at the boys around me…again.

Seriously, I couldn’t get over the fact that there were real-live boys in the classroom. Most girls I asked said that they liked having boys because you learn how to deal with them, which is good since your colleagues in the real world will be both males and females. Twibell praised coed education because she felt she was able to get to know the boys on a daily basis, in a casual environment, rather than on weekends when you can’t sit down to talk. Wait, so shouting at a boy over the blasting music at a concert doesn’t count as getting to know them?

Seminar ended and I trudged back to the car that I had arrived so nervously in just a few hours ago. Nervousness was now replaced with knowledge and appreciation for public schooling, and an understanding of their world.

Overall, Shawnee Mission East was Shawnee-Mission-Complete-Opposite-of-Sion, but not in a bad way. I think everyone can agree there are pros and cons to both private and public schools, as well as single-sex and coed education. And while Shawnee Mission East did seem pretty wonderful, I’ll stick to girls on weekdays and my grey kilt, thank you very much.