Soompi reports that on December 26, the Seoul Office of Education held a ceremony to award Baek Min Sung and three other students from the School Of Performing Arts Seoul (SOPA) for their efforts to uncover corruption at the school. Well-known alumni from SOPA include EXO's Kai and Sehun, BTS' Jungkook, and former Miss A member Suzy.
During the event, the superintendent of education said, "We're awarding the leaders who stood against the violation of [students'] rights. We hope that they will be leaders of society in the future as well."
In February 2019, the students created a short musical criticizing the injustice involving student exploitation and posted it on YouTube. It started with the sentence: "This video has been created to advocate for the student victims." It now has more than six million views.
According to Soompi, some of these offenses include "forcing students to perform at outside-of-school events, making students use their money to pay for various expenses needed for these private performances, asking students to act sexy or to be physically affectionate, discriminating against students who refused to perform at said events, and forcefully prohibiting students from talking about attending these private performances."
Baek Min Sung first raised the issue of the SOPA president and chief of administration making students perform at private events in August 2018.
Follow Lily on Instagram.