High schools across nation to TikTok: We’re catching feelings

WINTER GARDEN, Fla. — On the wall of a classroom that is home to the West Orange High School TikTok club, large loopy words are scrawled across a whiteboard: “Wanna be TikTok famous? Join TikTok club.”

It’s working. “There’s a lot of TikTok-famous kids at our school,” said Amanda DiCastro, who is 14 and a freshman. “Probably 20 people have gotten famous off random things.”

The school is on a quiet palm tree-lined street in a town just outside Orlando. A hallway by the principal’s office is busy with blue plaques honoring the school’s Advanced Placement Scholars. Its choir director, Jeffery Redding, won the 2019 Grammy Music Educator Award.

Amanda was referring to a different kind of popularity: on TikTok, a social media app where users post short funny videos, usually set to music, that is enjoying a surge in popularity among teenagers around the world and has been downloaded 1.4 billion times, according to SensorTower.

The embrace of the app at this school is mirrored on scattered campuses across the United States, where students are forming TikTok clubs to dance, sing and perform skits for the app — essentially drama clubs for the digital age, but with the potential to reach huge audiences.

And unlike other social media networks, TikTok is winning over some educators, like Michael Callahan,

a teacher at West Orange, who had never heard of TikTok before the students told him about it. He is an adviser to the school’s club and said he loves how the app brings students from different friend groups together. “You see a lot more teamwork and camaraderie,” he said, “and less — I don’t want to say bullying — but focus on individuals.”

In many of the videos on the app, which are 15 seconds to a minute long, school hallways, classrooms and courtyards serve as a recurrent backdrop. And if kids aren’t filming themselves at school, they’re making jokes about school.

“TikTok is such a theatrical platform,” said Blake Cadwell, general manager of Day One agency, a marketing firm in Los Angeles that works on Chipotle’s TikTok account. “You’re trying to build your cast for whatever you’re doing, and high school is a natural environment where you’re with lots of people, so you can do these skits or challenges.” A big part of TikTok culture, challenges are videos users create that riff off an of-the-moment meme.