i stopped standing for the pledge in high school and so did a lot of other kids. the older we got, the harder it was to force us to do it. i noticed it was mostly the white suburbanite kids still doing it in high school whereas most POC, and some of the “weird whites” (i.e LGBT whites, nerds, goths) would just lay their heads on the desk or text because it was too early for that shit. i went to a kinda liberal school though. i’m sure it was different at private schools charter schools and religious schools. also i was lucky to have kinda lefty teachers in the morning. i heard more conservative teachers mandated it and made a big deal out of it.

Yeah, I remember it mostly not being taken seriously in high school, and I just ignored it apart from my last semester there, when there was the unfortunate combination of it happening during a class that I actually enjoyed and was interested in (and which I'd probably say was the single positive experience I had in high school) and the teacher making a big deal of it, so I stood to avoid antagonizing someone I otherwise liked and respected.

one thing i thought was funny is that a lot of the kids in ROTC wouldn’t stand for the pledge. a lot of them were only in ROTC as a form of punishment for some form of “juvenile delinquency”.

That's wild, the only thing I ever heard from ROTC kids in high school was that they wanted to be officers or get some enlistment privileges related to having taken ROTC.