James Gilbert, DECA vice president and senior

What inspired you to make this TikTok?

“Mainly, we’d like to give credit to Westfield, since they made one that got around 100,000 likes and it kind of inspired us to show our school too.”

Why was it made under DECA’s name?

“Since DECA is in the café pretty often, and Westfield made their TikTok for their Rock Shop, we decided to just make it from our café too. We weren’t really thinking much about DECA when we were making it. We just thought it was going to be a funny video and didn’t expect it to go viral, because every other video only had 20 likes, so we were really shocked when it went viral.”

How was your response to the comments?

“The first day just had a lot of positive comments, like, “What a nice school,” but then after that it started to be more negative. Like, “Where’s the diversity at? What a terrible school,” and after that we started deleting the bad ones. Then we just turned it off altogether because it was getting out of hand.

What is your response to the specific negative allegations made?

“We had a lot of negative allegations and even had some threats that would come in, like some pretty serious stuff, so I don’t want anyone in danger here at CHS. I want to make sure everyone is safe and protected.”

Why did you make Part 2?

“We made a part 2 after the first one blew up and got 200,000 likes, which is pretty cool, so we made the Part 2 a day after, but like I said there was no hate at the beginning and all the comments were nice but then later more hate just came in.”

Can you tell me about the process involved in creating the video?

“It was actually pretty simple, since we just wanted to show off Carmel in the best way possible, so what we kind of did was show off the nice stuff, like the biggest and coolest stuff at this school—the auditorium, the commons—just to get attention.”

If you could remake the TikTok what would you change?

“If you looked at the video it kind of seems like we are just showing off, so if we could retake it, I would just add more background to each place before the video started. So, I would for sure add more context about what happens at each place and show more diversity, which is probably the biggest thing; we’ve got to show more diversity.”

Do you have any future plans in making more videos?

“We have the DECA State competitions coming up soon, so we will be making more videos, but not about the school since we’re done with the hate and the curiosity is dying, so more videos about DECA itself.”

Anything else you have to say?

“I just want to thank everyone for the TikTok for blowing up; it was great to see CHS being represented in such a big manner.”

Kendall Slifer, DECA chief of roleplays and senior

What inspired you to make this TikTok?

“Westfield made a tour of their school, then made another video that kind of attacked CHS. Our coordinator of the café was like, “We’re not going to respond to that,” but I decided we aren’t going to attack negatively, but we are going to one-up them, and that’s why we did the video.”

How was your response to the comments? 

“There was a lot of hate directed towards the video over something I have no control over, so we turned the comments off. It was easier to just ignore it because it wasn’t something I could do anything about.”

If you could remake the TikTok what would you change?

“The thing I would probably change about it would be showing parts of Carmel that aren’t as good, so people don’t get the perception that everything is perfect at Carmel.”

What is your response to the specific negative allegations made?

“A lot of negativity wasn’t coming from students or kids from other schools. We noticed most people who were starting controversy were adults completely in other states. It’s hard to look at the negative feedback regarding diversity and funding from property taxes as that is something we have absolutely no control over. So from our standpoint we turned off the comments and duets as we felt they were taking a TikTok we made for fun and twisting it into many other issues.”

Do you have any future plans in making more videos?

“We have a very large following, so hope to use it in some aspect to build DECA’s name, but we’ll see how everything goes from there.”

Can you tell me about the process involved in creating the video?

“We just filmed it during our work period, for CTSO, which was Block 3 for me. We just kind of ran over what are cool places in Carmel and walked to those places and said, “This is this,” and that was kind of it.”