It's very nice of you to want to help make your high school a batter place, but it's a hard job for an individual student. It seems to me that your best bet would be to start by becoming a top notch student yourself. I don't know how good you are already, but maybe you can see room for improvement. If you improved your performance as a student by a small percentage, that would raise the overall percentage by a certain amount. You would also be setting an example for the other students to follow. The top students in any school usually serve as role models for the others, and schools are judged by the quality and achievements of the best students they turn out. 

I think you need to start by looking around your own high school and identifying an area for improvement. Perhaps survey other students to get their opinions as well. This prompt doesn't ask you to outline how you might make a generic high school a better place; it ask you how you might make your high school a better place. Making this assignment realistic and specific to you and your school should make it far more engaging to write!

Why don’t you try addressing whether it would be possible for teachers to teach allow students to pick topics of personal interest as a means of learning about literature, history, science, social studies, math, and etc. For example: could a student learn math skills by studying architecture drawing? Or could someone learn figurative language through articles or stories about hunting? What about allowing students more freedom of choice over their studies?

For this paper, you may want to hone in on one specific area such as bullying.  You can prevent bullying on an individual level by not laughing and going along with the bully when they are picking at someone.  You can be a friend to a person who is being bullied.

On a broader scope, you could develop an "anti-bullying"  club at your school whose job is to cause awareness about bullying.

A change for the better in any community - a school is an ideal place - is to use the simple philosophy of 'treat others as you wish to be treated'. If this premise was utilised by staff, students and caregivers then the school environment would be a much happier place to be. Everyone would think about the feelings of others before they spoke, would consider setting goals that they see value in attaining and would give praise and positive feedback when asked to contribute. Certainly an ideal - but a worthwhile change.

Think of what you expect in a teacher that you could say makes the school a "better place."  Are there not some commonalities between the ideal teacher and the ideal student?  Most students expect a teacher to practice the work habits that she/he demands of students. for one thing.

So, why not consider the point that a student who wishes to improve his/her school should start by setting an example in his/her social and intellectual behavior.  A competitive student can often inspire others to become competitive; they, in turn, inspire others, and so on until the atmosphere in the school becomes competitive.  Sadly, students often expect atmospheres to develop on their own without realizing that it is always people who generate atmosphere.  

Consider the classrooms that you enjoy entering and ask yourself what causes this atmosphere.  Then, you will find your answers in the pleasant, unbiased, competent, caring, energetic, challenging teacher who runs this classroom. 

I think that seeking to minimize the destructive effect is of cliques is a way to make high school better.  Over the last decade, I have seen more social fragmentation amongst cliques in and around high school life.  There have always been groupings and sects, and while they existed, groups had a relative code of conduct where there as a sense of live and let live.  There was bullying and intimidation and exclusivity, but it seems like such elements' presence now in the high school setting is much more destructive and focuses more on targeting others, as opposed to enhancing one's own sense of self.  It would seem to me that any attempts to minimizing the destructive nature of modern cliques would be a good attempt to make a difficult setting of high school a better one.

The biggest problem in the middle/high school years is the student's overall tolerance with inappropriate behavior. In an average class there may be one to three students that are behavior problems and are not interested in learning or doing the work. They talk out in class, they make fun of other students, they distract other students and the teacher while learning should be going on. Teachers are equipped to deal with these distractions. The larger problem is the reaction of the class to these students. Often the other students will laugh, begin talking, lose focus or encourage more inappropriate behavior. This adds to the time away from covering the material the teacher needs to go over. Instead, if students realized that these peers were detracting from their education and chose to ignore them or gave them some form of negative reaction, perhaps the distractions would happen less. It is up to each, individual student what they take from their high school experience. Yes, teachers make a difference to an extent, but in the end it will be 'your' time and 'your' effort that will bring about the result you want. So, the biggest thing you can do to make your high school a better place would be to take charge of your education and see it as your job, for the time being, getting out of it what you put into it.