By Juan Carlos Ramirez ’18
THE ROUNDUP

Student and faculty say Brophy has achieved the diversity aspect of a community with its students that inhabit a variety of places within the valley, practice many religions and have many ethnic backgrounds.

Even being a Catholic high school, Taif Abdulazeez ’18 said that Brophy and the community has been really been very accepting of him and his beliefs.

“Not even been close of being stereotyped here at Brophy,” Abdulazeez said. “I have never had one person make fun of me for being Muslim.”

Abdulazeez said that he is very accepting of other people’s religious and ethnic backgrounds, but he is friends with people who have the same goals as he does, which is to succeed.

“What matters is that I talk to the people that have the same goals as me,” Abdulazeez said. “ If we have the same goals like succeeding.”

Mr. Danforth said that he agrees that these different religious groups bring something unique into the community.

“The best example of that is a frosh retreat when I was a faculty member at one of the prayer services,” Mr. Tom Danforth ’78 said. “We planned out this prayer. The big brother that we did the prayer at his house was Jewish, so he did a prayer in Hebrew, another kid who was Muslim did a prayer for the dead and someone else who was Hindu made a prayer from his tradition. It was awesome.”

The ethnic diversity within Brophy has been an ongoing change.

Kinner Patel ’18 said that some of his culture does carry over into Brophy.

“I would be open to have people learn about Indian culture, and what it’s like to be a second generation Indian-American,” Patel said.

Mr. Andy Schmidbauer ’88, World Languages department chair, said that it is important to have a diverse student body so we can learn from each other.

“Even though people come from different traditions, every one is a human being and we all have the same needs,” Mr. Schmidbauer said. “I would hate to see Brophy, or any school for that matter, to be made up of one type. It gets boring.”