Since the school first opened its gates to its first batch of students on Aug. 27, 2002,  Westview has been a battleground for students and the monsters that hide between the walls. Each day, students stick close to their food supplies, dreading the next time these little pests would attack. This clash between student and animal has gone without a resolution for the past decade, until these creatures began falling from the ceiling onto our heads. It was then that it became crystal clear: Westview has an ant problem.

The problem has become so bad that students are led to believe that Westview was not built on just one or two ant colonies, but upon an entire nation of ants. These pesky little insects must have been pretty angry at PUSD for building a high school over their home because they have continued to terrorize the campus no matter how hard students and teachers have fought back, and they show no signs of stopping any time soon.

Kevin Yu (12) has more than three years’ worth of ant-related catastrophes.

“They’re pretty obnoxious,” he said. “One time we had a club event and we had thrown food in the classroom trashcan and by the end, and I’m not even exaggerating, there was like 5,000 ants across the table and walls.”

Skyler Reyes (12) also has encountered her fair share of ants.

“Ants are disgusting,” she said. “They invade my privacy and are everywhere. I absolutely hate it when I’m doing my work and they just show up, and I think to myself ‘What are you even doing here?’ There are even ants in the bathrooms that rummage through the trash cans and I feel like I can’t even go to the bathroom.”

Nonetheless, the student body has fought back valiantly, consistently smashing lone soldier ants under their fingertips and destroying their bases of operation at the back of the school.

“At first I like to watch them crawl around and then I squish them,” Rylie Lessbeck (11) said. “I feel so evil. I watch them, and I play with them, and then I get bored, and I kill them.”

Yu recalled the chemistry platoon taking extreme measures to rid their classroom of ants.

“I didn’t do this, but some people would burn ants with the bunsen burner,” he said.

While both the students and the ants have put up a good fight, this conflict has gone on for far too long. The students’ first job is to learn, not defend their Food Friday donuts from microscopic devils. It has become obvious that ants are the number one most distracting thing for students during class.

“When I’m taking a test, I just see ants crawling on me and I’m like ‘Okay, this is timed, I don’t have time for you guys to crawl up in my business.’” said Kelly Gorman (11).

This situation must come to an end. Students cannot lose focus on their main goal in life: to find a way to destroy to ants species all together.

Now is the time for students to band together, to forget their trivial rivalry with Mt. Carmel, the peer pressure, the academic dishonesty, or even the fact that our precious “W” was   vandalized and focus on what actually matters: the complete annihilation of ants on our beloved campus.

Just because insecticide is not allowed on campus does not mean students should have to continue to live in fear of ant-infested donuts. If Westview is to stop the ant infestation, students must take matters into their own hands. Sitting and waiting for a guardian angel to descend from the administration will not bring peace back onto campus.

Westview is about to house the war to end all wars, a place where each student will be equipped with lethal weapons like water for drowning ants, or thick textbooks to lay over an ant train.

Thanks to the efforts of math teacher on campus, Stephanie Vanderby, Westview has created the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.

Her formula for ant eradication is to mix a quarter cup of sugar in a cup of warm water, plus two good size tablespoons of Borax. She then soaks a cotton ball in the solution before placing it on a trail of ants. In theory, when ants consume the borax bait, it interferes with their digestive system and gradually kills them. This slow death will allow the worker ants to have time to consume the bait and head back to the nest to share with the rest of the colony and queen. Once the queen has been poisoned, the battle will finally be won.

If Westview comes together and places these cotton balls all around the school, we may just have figured out a solution to our ant problem.

Then the school can finally focus on the next big problem at hand: leaky roofs.