People across the country know and love the reality show “The Real Housewives of Potomac” and soon, reality TV fans will have one more to binge: “The Real Students of WCHS,” WCHS’s very own reality TV show, which will be aired on May 1, 2025. The show will follow the daily lives of WCHS students as they attend classes, face hardships and argue with their friends. However, there is a twist: WCHS students will have no control over when and if they will be filmed.
The camera crews and producers arrived at WCHS on March 5, 2025 and immediately began filming. The producers started by following a select few seniors but as filming progressed, they expanded to film more and more students in order to get as much content as possible.
WCHS senior Isabella Harrison is one of the many WCHS students who did not enjoy having their personal lives filmed. Harrison was walking the hallways of WCHS while engaging in a particularly heated telephone conversation with her mother over a missed homework assignment when, all of a sudden, the camera crew jumped out from behind the bulldog statue and began chasing her down the halls. Harrison felt that it was a violation of her privacy.
“I can not believe this! The filming has gotten way out of control,” Harrison said. “One minute I was in the middle of an argument with my mom because I forgot to do an AP Statistics assignment and the next, I was being chased by cameras. I am not okay with this, the show needs to leave immediately.”
In addition to stalking WCHS students’ personal lives, the producers have gone as far as instructing the camera crews to disturb students in their classes. WCHS senior Jordyn Hoffman was in the middle of an assessment when the camera crews showed up in her AP Literature and Composition class and started filming her while she was trying to concentrate.
“I was just sitting in my AP Lit class writing my Common Task essay–which is worth a lot of my grade–and this cameraman barged in and began filming,” Hoffman said. “It made it really difficult to focus on my writing, especially since he was right in front of my desk recording me.”
While Harrison and Hoffman saw this non-consensual filming as harassment, other students loved the spotlight. WCHS junior Victoria Kaprilian saw the TV show as a way to talk about issues she was passionate about and a chance to promote her two clubs: Moco4Change and Dawgs Against Substance Abuse (DASA).
“This show is the best thing to ever happen at WCHS,” Kaprilian said. “It is crazy that we get a whole show to highlight student life here. A big part of student life here is community engagement and so I was excited to have the opportunity to talk about the positive change DASA and Moco4Change have created at WCHS. I hope ‘The Real Students of WCHS’ encourages more students to get involved with clubs and their community.”
