Five sets of twins make Freshman Academy twice the fun

LYNN – As if the Lynn Classical Freshman Academy teachers did not have enough adversity to handle this year with nearly 300 new students forced to re-locate to the Fecteau-Leary building because of structural concerns on O’Callaghan way, they now have the Monteros sisters and four other sets of twins creating confusion, and a little mischief, on a daily basis.Gabriela Monteros admits that she is the troublemaker in the family, but she is not above placing the blame on her identical twin sister Gladys, which can cause more than a little confusion among the administration at the academy.”I got in trouble and I had to get detention, but when they asked my name I told them my sister’s and they came and got her out of class,” Gabriela explained with a smile.”I got her back, I told the teachers to go to the class that she was in, and she ended up with the detention,” Gladys shot back, also quick to claim that she gets better grades.The sisters are one of five sets of twins in the freshmen class, joining Khelay and Khosay Sharifi, Dillon and Riley McManus, Tatianna and Tahanna Brown and Hto and Say Pow – two Burmese refugees who have relocated to Lynn from Thailand.Classical Academy Principal Judith Taylor says there is even a sixth twin in the class, but the pair has been split up between two schools.”I just thought this was really weird,” she said. “There must have been something in the water that year.”All of the twins are in the same grade, but the birth years vary from 1991-1993. The Monteros and Paw sisters were even born within five days of one another in May of 1992, although the Paws were a half a world away from Lynn at the time.Only the Brown sisters are paternal twins, and all of the sets are the same gender, adding to the oddity of the situation, and the difficulty for teachers. The Sharifi twins even admitted to swapping schedules to fool their teachers and classmates.”I can only tell them apart if I can see their faces clearly,” teacher Melissa Winchell said of the Paw twins. “I have to walk around to the front and get a good look at them. I think when they came here, ‘twins’ was probably the first English word that they heard, because we all pointed it out.”While all 10 of the students put an end to the myth that twins can feel sympathy pains, two sets have had strange experiences with injuries in very close proximity to one another.The McManus brothers spoke of a doomed middle school gym class where one brother was knocked out and had to go to the hospital, and a short time later the other was hit in the groin with a ball. Tashanna Brown said she sprained her ankle just hours after her sister had her tonsils removed, and the two ended up at the same hospital.Several of the siblings attended school with each other in the past and have become close friends, and, for the most part, everyone seems to get along well with their twin despite having to spend a lot of time with one another.Although it is still four years away, almost everyone said they would be willing to attend college or stay close to their twin if the situation was right, although Dillon McManus said he would only stay with his brother if “his career made him more money than mine.”As each group enters high school the rivalry has picked up a bit, with the younger twins claiming more maturity and better grades, although the older twins beg to differ, but the overall opinion of the Classical Freshmen Academy is positive on all sides.”I actually wish that they could have put all of the money into (the Fecteau-Leary) school so that all of the students could come here instead of splitting us up,” said Riley McManus.